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Renewing Your Mind
I AM: The Being of God
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When God declared to Moses, “I AM WHO I AM,” He revealed His self-existence and limitless power. Today, R.C. Sproul shows how the name of God exhibits His eternal glory as the supreme and perfect being. For your donation of any amount, get R.C....
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Why is there something rather than nothing? Why isn't the entire universe just empty space or a black hole with nothing at all in it? Well, the answer to that question should be so simple in the beginning. God.
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Welcome to Renewing youg Mind on this Saturday. I'm Nathan W. Bingham. We're returning today to RC Sproul series Moses and the Burning Bush. Before we get to it, don't forget that if you'd like this series on DVD along with its companion book, we'll send you both when you donate today in support of Renewing youg mind@renewingyourmind.org you can also find a link in the comment of today's YouTube video. Well, there on Mount Horeb, God declared His name to be I am who? That might sound like a strange name, but that name points to the fact that everything begins and ends with God. Here's Dr. Sproul.
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We're going to continue with our study of the experience of Moses in the Midianite wilderness when he encountered God in the burning bush and God revealed himself in an extraordinary way to him. We've already seen some of the implications of what God had revealed to Moses in that brief conversation, but I want to explore further in this session the significance of the name by which God reveals himself when he calls himself simply, I am who I am. So let's look back at that portion of the text where in chapter three of Exodus verse 13, Moses said to God. Indeed, when I come to the children of Israel and say to them, the God of your fathers has sent me to you. And they say to me, what is his name? What shall I say to them? And God said to Moses, I am who I am. And he said, thus you shall say to the children of Israel, I am has sent me to you. Moreover, God said to Moses, thus you shall say to the children of Israel, the Lord God of your fathers, the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob has sent me to you. This is my name forever, and this is my memorial name to all generations. Now, some critics, when they read this account and see that Moses asks God to give him his name, and God responds in this very strange and mysterious way by saying, I am who I am. Some of the critics say that what God is doing here is basically refusing to reveal his name, saying, it's none of your business what my name is. I am who I am. And we're just going to let it go at that. But I think that the context in which God calls himself I am who I am forbids that critical interpretation because God makes it clear that he's not refusing to reveal his name, but that he is giving a name, his name, to Moses, which name is to be his name forever for all generations, and his memorial name. And we saw early on in our studies of this incident that in Hebrew categories in the Old Testament, that the names of people are given to reveal something about who they were. Even Moses was given the name Moses because he was drawn out of the water. We remember that Jacob became Israel because he wrestled with God and struggled. And so throughout the Scriptures, we see the names of individuals telling us something significant about their being or their character. And there is nowhere in Sacred Scripture where that is more profoundly true than here, when God reveals Himself in this extraordinary manner by saying, I am who I am. Now, before I look at this any further, let me ask this simple question. Why do you worship God? Why do you give to Him a reverence and a sense of adoration that differs from any esteem that you give to anything in the created world? You know, it's easy for us to love God, to be grateful to God, and to worship God because of all of the wonderful things he's done in history and in our own history for ourselves. But I don't think the Christian rises to true worship until the Christian begins to worship God not for what he has done, but for who he is in his transcendent majesty. When we realize, as the theologians of the past have said, that God is the most perfect being. I quibble a little bit with that definition because really, perfection does not admit to. To degrees. But the Church Fathers wanted to get our attention with this intentional redundancy, to say he's the most perfect being. Lest we underestimate the significance of God's perfection, all that he is, all of his attributes, his omniscience, his omnipresence, his eternality, his simplicity, all of the attributes that attend our understanding of God are without blemish, without any mixture of imperfection. And so let's ask the question now. That was the oldest question that scientists and philosophers asked in antiquity. It's a most provocative question. And yet in its expression, it is rather simple. Anyone can grasp it. The question is, why is there something rather than nothing? Why does anything exist in this universe? You know, the psalmist, without understanding the immensities of the galaxies and the billions of stars that we hear about from the astronomers today, just in his naked observation of the world around him, looked at the stars and said, you know, when I look at the stars and the moon, and all that you have made. I'm forced to ask the question, what is man, that thou art mindful of him? Even from the perspective of ancient man, the immensity of the universe seemed to overwhelm him and made him feel utterly insignificant in the light of the vastness of reality as we perceive it. And of course, when David uttered those words, he hadn't a clue to the extent of the universe. Even as we don't really have any grasp of the significance of it, we're forced to ask the question, why? Why this universe? Why is there something rather than nothing? Why isn't the entire universe just empty space or a black hole with nothing at all in it? Well, the answer to that question really is easy. And it should be so simple, so manifest, that it should never incite any kind of debate or argument. And that answer is found in the very first verse of the Bible, where we read, in the beginning, God. Let me just start there. In the beginning, God. And then it goes on. Created the heaven and the earth. So what's being positive in the opening statement of sacred Scripture? The first thing it's telling us is this. There was a beginning. There was a time when all of these stars, all of the trees, all the fish, all of the animals, all of the people didn't exist at all. Everything in the universe has a beginning. It starts at a particular moment in space and time. And before that, all that existed in reality was God. Not nothing, but God, because at the very beginning, there was God. And the beginning came to pass because this God who doesn't have a beginning, this God who is eternal, created everything that is in this world. Now, you hear all the time about the inquiries and the debates about the origins of the universe. And we hear from frequently about the Big Bang theory of cosmogony, of how the universe came to be. And just a simple recapitulation of it tells us that at one point in time, no pun intended, all matter, all energy in this vast universe was compressed into this tiny, infinitesimal, what's called point of singularity. And this point of singularity was totally organized in this compressed reality for eternity and for eternity past. It obeyed methodically the law of inertia. The law of inertia says that those things which are at rest tend to remain at rest until acted upon or unless acted upon by an outside force. And those things that are in motion tend to remain in motion unless acted upon by an outside force. But the secularist at this point says we have an origin of the universe that defies the law of inertia. Because for all eternity, this point of singularity stayed in this organized state without an iota of mutation or change. And then one Thursday afternoon at 3:15, boom. It exploded. And the repercussions of that explosion are still being searched in the vastness of the universe, as the present universe seems to be expanding from that original explosion. At one point, I was in conversation with Carl Sagan about this, and he said, we can go back to the first nanosecond before the Big Bang, all that way back. And I said, and why do you stop there? He said, well, we don't feel the need to go back before that. I said, there's no question that screams louder than that need to go back there. If you're a scientist, for goodness sake, you have to ask the question, why the Big Bang? How the Big Bang? What was before the Big Bang? But what was before the Big Bang was a manifestation of the verb to be. Our language cannot function without this simple verb to be. That verb which is in the middle of the name of God. God does not say to Moses, here's what my name is. My name is, once upon a time I was, now I am, and I'm still going to be around tomorrow because I have a future. That's not how he introduces himself, but he introduces himself in terms of the eternal present. I am who I am. I am the personification of the verb to be. Again. In the ancient world, as philosophers tried to figure out how the universe came into being and how the universe could be understood in an intelligible way, Plato wanted to save the phenomena. That is, you look at all of the experience of things that we see, the birds and the trees and the crickets and the daffodils and all those things, and how can we make sense of them? How does all of that diversity fit together in any coherent, meaningful all? And the philosopher Parmenides said, fundamentally, the most important thing for us to understand as we try to examine reality is this. Whatever is, is. What he was saying here is that nothing can exist apart from being pure, being perfect, being without any shadow of turning. Now he was challenged by Heraclitus, who came on to say, no, no, no, no. Everything that we investigate in the world around us has one thing in common. Bears differ radically from daffodils. But the one thing that every bear has in common with every daffodil is that all things in the creaturely world are in a state of becoming. Heraclitus said, you can't step into the same river twice. Everything's in a state of flux. What did he mean by that? He said, well, the river is running down its banks. And you put one foot in, wet your toes in the river, and then you want to put the next toe in, but the river has moved on. The river has changed. And not only that, but you have changed. Today Vesta was bringing out all kinds of photographs from the past History of 40 Years of Ligonier ministry. And a bunch of photographs of me. And the naked eye could perceive the radical character of the changes over those 40 years. You know that today I'm different from what I was yesterday, if only one day older, one hair grayer, one molecule weaker, one step closer, closer to my own demise. And what is true of me at that point is true of you as well. And the one element that everything that is in a state of becoming has with every other thing that is in a state of becoming is one critical word. Change. Every four years, when there's an election for the President of the United States, some candidate runs his campaign on the promise of bringing change. It's time for a change. And the assumption is that any change that comes to pass will be a good one. But that's not the case. We all know that things change in our lives, and they don't always change for the better. Sometimes they are for the worse. So we are defined as creatures by change. And that's what is the difference between me and God. You know, we say this distinction that God is the supreme being and we are human beings. And so we think that the difference between God and us has to do with those adjectives that qualify the concept of being. He is supreme. We are human. But do you know what the real difference is between God and me is? Being. He alone has being in and of Himself. He alone has eternal being. Any being that I have is transitory. Any being that I have is. Is dependent. It's contingent. It's derived. It's a subset of pure being. That's what Apostle Paul said to the Athenian philosophers with respect to God. In him we live and move and have our being. Let me put it another way. Without him, we couldn't live. Our existence would be static, inert. We couldn't move. The stars would freeze in their courses because their motion is not independent. It started in this vast organization, in static inertia. Aristotle understood that for anything to move in this world, it has to be moved by something other than itself. So even our emotion depends on the being of God. In him we live and move and have our being. Let me just say this. We debate all the time about can we prove the existence of God. If we define God as an eternal being from whom all things come and upon whom all things are dependent, I think that that proposition can be proved indubitably and compellingly in about 10 seconds. 10 seconds. We don't have to jump into an abyss of darkness and just embrace God with a leap of faith. It's rationally compelling. How can that be? If anything exists, anything, these glasses, something, somewhere, somehow, must have the power of being in himself. Without that, nothing can exist again. If there were ever a time that there were nothing, just imagine a vast emptiness in the universe. Pure darkness. Nothing. No stars, no people, no ocean. What could there possibly be now?
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God's existence, his very being, is what allows us to live and breathe. It's incredible to think about, isn't it? And the Apostle Paul would echo that in Acts 17 when he addressed the men of Athens. For in him we live and move, and have our being I'm glad you've joined us for this Saturday edition of renewing youg mind. R.C. sproul taught this series with a desire to help us as Christians see the significance of God's revelation to Moses. This is a 10 part study and we'll send it to you on DVD as our way of thanking you for your donation@renewingyourmind.org and in support of Renewing youg Mind and the global outreach of Ligonier Ministries, we'll unlock the series and study guide for you in the Ligonier app as well as send you the companion book, also titled Moses and the Burning Bush. Respond before midnight tonight@renewingyourmind.org or by using the link in the podcast Show Notes and we'll send you the series and book while unlocking it for you digitally in your Ligonier Learning Library. If you live outside of the US and Canada, an entirely digital edition of today's resource offer is waiting for you@renewingyourmind.org global. Thank you for your generosity and for helping take trusted teaching to the nations. I mentioned the Renewing youg Mind YouTube channel earlier in today's episode. If you have not subscribed, please consider it as not only will you have convenient access to each day's episode, your subscription and every time you like or comment on a video helps the YouTube algorithm push this teaching to more people on more devices. It's an easy way to show your support and spread the reach of renewing your mind. Thank you. Well, with regard to the creation of the universe. Have you ever heard the term spontaneous generation? I hope you'll join us now next time as RC Sproul explains the absurdity of that hypothesis, he'll explain that God's self existence is the only logical explanation for the universe. That's next Saturday here on Renewing youg Mind.
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Sam.