Chapter 1: What spiritual battle is being referenced at the beginning?
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You have to eat. You have to drink water. You have to breathe air. You have all these needs. We're all like that. We're all dependent on external things to keep us alive. God depends on nothing. God and God alone has the power to be within himself.
Isn't that an incredible thought? Our temptation can be to make God smaller, more like us, and sadly to elevate man. That's why we need our minds renewed according to the Word of God. This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind. I'm Nathan W. Bingham, and it's good to have you with us. This week you have been hearing messages from R.C. Sproul's series, Names of God.
You'll hear several of those messages this week, but it is a 15-message series. So request your copy, along with three books from Dr. Sproul, when you give a year-end donation at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343 before midnight tomorrow. Well, here's Dr. Sproul picking up from yesterday's message and continuing his study of the name Yahweh.
God revealed himself to Moses with his sacred name, Yahweh, which is translated into the English by the phrase, I am who I am. We've already looked briefly at some of the significance of that name. But to be honest with you, I think we could spend the next 10 weeks on this name and only, at best, scratch the surface of what's there.
In popular religious language, people frequently make the distinction between human beings and God. And the distinction is usually articulated as something like this. We are human beings, but God is the supreme being. I want you to think about that for a moment, and let me ask this question. What's the difference between a human being and the supreme being?
What's the chief difference, the essential difference? And I'm choosing my words a little bit carefully here when I say, what is the essential difference between a human being and the supreme being? Now, the word that I was playing with there is the word essential difference. What does that word suggest to you?
If I say that something is essential, you will suggest perhaps that this means that which is absolutely necessary. And that's a perfectly legitimate interpretation of the word essential. But in its barest bone meaning, essential means necessary. of the essence of something. I love to do crossword puzzles. In fact, every morning I do two of them.
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Chapter 2: How does R.C. Sproul describe God's self-existence?
Do you ever think about that? Why you are, why anything is.
I know this. But 60 years ago, as recently as 60 years ago, in fact, as recently as 56 years ago, nobody in the world cared about R.C. Sproul, at least not this R.C. Sproul. I cared about my grandfather, whose name was R.C. Sproul, but nobody cared about the one who's speaking to you now. Do you know why? There wasn't any R.C.
Chapter 3: What is the significance of the name Yahweh?
Sproul. R.C. Sproul didn't exist. The world was getting along fine without me. I didn't know anything. about the world and the world didn't know anything about me because I was not. But then in February of 1939, my mother delivered a baby at Southside Hospital in Pittsburgh and called him RC. I started, actually I started when I was conceived, but My life began in this world on my birthday.
But before that, I was not. Then I began to exist.
I started to be. But I didn't start to be by myself. I had a beginning. I had to be generated or procreated by other people before this human being could even be at all.
The one thing I know about you, even if I don't know your name, is that there was a time when you were not. There was a time when you did not exist. And that if you exist now, you have a beginning. You exist and your existence is real, even though it's changing from moment to moment, from day to day, from year to year, you change. You see, you go through all those changes because...
Really, it'd be more proper, as the old philosophers used to say, to describe us not as human beings, but as human becomeings. Because whatever we are is never permanent. Whatever we are is always changing. I'm different now than I was when I started this message. If I'm only 13 minutes and 54 seconds older than I was when we started, I am always in process. I am always becoming.
My being is not pure being. It is not perfect being. Because what I do not have and what you do not have is the power of being in yourself. You can't exist for the next five minutes without oxygen, without something preserving your existence. You have to eat, you have to drink water, you have to breathe air, you have all these needs. We're all like that.
We're all dependent on external things to keep us alive.
God depends on nothing.
God and God alone has the power to be within himself. In theology, we use two different words or phrases to describe this attribute of God. The most common one we hear is the attribute of self-existence. I'm reminded of the two little children that were engaged in a debate. And the first little boy asked the second little boy, where did the trees come from?
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Chapter 4: What is the essential difference between human beings and the supreme being?
The sun doesn't have it. The universe doesn't have it. I, I alone can say I am who I am. Because I alone have the very power to be intrinsically. It's not borrowed. It's not derived. It's not gained or gotten from some other source. But I am eternally whoever is, is. That's what Parmenides was getting at.
He's saying, if anything exists in this world, Parmenides is saying, if anything has any limited degree of being, a human being, a creaturely being, a dependent being, a finite being, for any of that to be at all, for there to be being somewhere, somehow, something, someone must be.
independent from everything else.
I mean, people argue all the time about whether God exists. I mean, to think about this for 15 seconds would answer the question, if nothing had the power of being within itself, nothing could possibly be. But if something is, then someone is. And I say it again, if something is... than someone is. Someone is in a pure state of absolute being.
There can be no human being, there can be no earthly being without Supreme Being, without someone whose name is I Am. who I am. The other word we use for this is a technical term. I'll just give it to you. You can write it down. You can forget it if you want to. But if you do ever read serious theology, you'll see it again and again. It's the simple little word aseity, A-S-E-I-T-Y.
It's one of my most favorite words in theology. I can't read that word aseity, A-S-E-I-T-Y, without having chill bumps. Because that one little word captures this magnificent, transcendent character of God. Aseity means that which has its being in and of itself. All of this, I believe, is clearly implied here. by the proper name of God.
For above all things, the thing that is most transcendent about God, the thing that distinguishes God more than anything else about Him from us is His being. For He alone has the power of being in Himself. And it's only because of that power of being that you and I can even sit around discussing the meaning of being. Without that power of being, we wouldn't be here at all.
This is the Wednesday edition of Renewing Your Mind, and that was R.C. Sproul from his series Names of God. Don't go anywhere, as he'll be back in just a moment. We've spent two days on the name Yahweh, and Dr. Sproul takes his time across 15 messages considering various names of God in the Bible.
You can work your way through this entire series when you request access with your year-end donation at renewingyourmind.org or when you call us at 800-435-4343. In addition to access to this series, we'll send you his title, What Are the Names of God? And to help you introduce people to the God of the Bible, we'll also send you two copies of The Great Rescue.
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