R.C. Sproul: Before the Beginning: The Aseity of God

let's pray shall we father when we consider your ASEA tea your eternal self existence we know that we enter now into that dimension of your character that is perhaps more unfathomable to our minds than any other if ever we need your condensate condescension if ever we need you to stoop to our level and list for our infantile ears it is here and yet father when we contemplate these things we pray that you would take us way beyond an exercise in abstract philosophical speculation and set us in that place where our minds are struck with a sense of awe of your being help me please in this difficult task for I ask it in Jesus name Amen before I go to the text of scripture I asked for the board to be brought over because there are two things I want to write on the board one is a question and the other is an indicative declarative statement now I prepared you that this may be difficult to track with me philosophically begins getting some heavy things here but let's start with these first two things I'm going to write on the board and stop me if I'm going too fast the first is a question you've heard this question before or maybe you've heard it already today how are you you ever heard that question thank you very much and then there's a declarative statement if you can't see me on the lower level here because of the blocking of the pulpit look up on the screen I'll get it I am fine thank you now am I going too fast this all right there are a couple of key elements in these statements that I want us to look at because we take them for granted in our normal conversation in our daily experience and communication but I want you to notice this word that's in the question and this word that is in the response when we ask the question how are you we're asking a question that relates to the state of your existence or to put it another way the state of your being and when we respond I'm fine we're making a statement about our condition about the state of our existence or the state of our being because in both of these statements what we have in common is the use of the most basic verb in the English language that we call the verb to be now I understand there are some remote languages in the world that do not have specific verbage to refer to being but almost all the languages with which we're familiar such as the Germanic languages the Romance languages the Greek language and so on have some form of the verb to be it's a word that is so common that those of you who have snow in the roof can remember the old television series called you bet your life hosted by Groucho Marx where a Groucho you know would have his guests come out and they would have a little dialogue for a few moments but there was a mystery word that was already discerned in advance and and if the host mentioned the mystery word inadvertently the duck would fall down from the ceiling with a hundred dollar bill in his mouth he remembered Paul you know and Groucho would say say the magic word and win $100 and George Fenneman would come out and pay see it was a household that common work nothing's more common than are and were was will be and so on is these are all forms of the verb to be but behind our language which may be simple is this profound concept of being or in the Greek the participial form is the present participle is the word Lucia which refers to the stuff by which things are constituted their essence or what Kant called the Dingle zishe now in our experience we tend to use this concept of being sort of in a graduated way a ladder stepladder way where we talk about graves or levels or ank's of being we talked about the type of being that you might find in a box of rocks my son-in-law always says to me well sounds not always but sometimes it says to me pap he says you're dumber than a box of rock that's not a complementary thing and so I say to the meathead but in any case stifle Wester at the bottom of the rungs the block of rocks and then we go up from the box of rocks to some plants some trees and we say that's kind of a little higher order of being from the rocks and then above the plants and the trees we go to the animal kingdom and we talked about the Kangaroos than the EMU's and the duck-billed platypuses and so on and talk about their existence in their animal being and then we go up the ladder a little bit higher and we talk about human beings uh-huh I have a fellow that was one of our original elders of st. Andrews whenever we would have personnel difficulties you know he said you know what we have here and I said what senses we have a beam problem a beam problem he said yeah human beings he said they're the ones human beings so like green beans with a little higher level of beingness and above the human beings we talk about the spirit beings of angels and so on and then in our vocabulary we go to the top of the ladder and we speak then of the Supreme Being now I've gone over this before in previous Ligonier conferences but we need to go over this again and again and again until we get it right that this suggests that there is such a thing as being of which all things in reality participate in one way or the other and that the difference between God and a box of rocks is just a matter of degrees we see that the difference is found in the qualifier for being in this distinction between human beings and supreme being but beloved the difference between the supreme being and the human being is not the difference in the adjectives it's not the difference between humaneness and supremacy the difference really is in this word being because if ever there was a misnomer in language it's to refer to rocks and trees and flowers and monkeys and people and angels as beings because in the strict sense no one of us is a being now to follow that I want to go back into the past a little refresher course into ancient thought where the ancient thinkers of philosophy before Socrates and Plato and Aristotle appeared on the scene these ancient thinkers were probing the deepest questions of the pursuit of truth that human beings could be engaged in they were searching for what they called the ark a principle or the principle of ultimate reality that transcendent metaphysical truth that would explain all other truth they were looking for Aysen transcendent unity that would make sense out of all of the diverse of this world and we remember the impasse that took place between two of the great philosophers prior to Socrates Parmenides and Heraclitus Parmenides works do not survive intact only so far as there have been yets of his thinking that are quoted from some of his essays and from some of his poems and of course the most famous philosophical insight that comes from the pen of Parmenides is the affirmation we'll write it up here so you won't ever forget it what is is now he wasn't he wasn't the president of Greece but he was concerned about what the meaning of is is and he said whatever is is I've never forget the first time in a college classroom when I was a student and the philosophy professor there introduced us to Parmenides and he wrote this same line on the board whatever is is and I chuckled you know out loud said this guy's famous all he ever did as far as achieving philosophical brilliance was he learned out a stutter whatever is is big deal and yet I have to say to you there is no philosophical concept I've ever been exposed to in my life that has driven me more often and more deeply to contemplate than this affirmation by Parmenides which simply means for something to exist there has to be being now his counterpart Heraclitus challenge this and said nothing is there is no such thing as pure absolute being because everything that we observe in the world around us every dimension of our experience every object of our knowledge is given to change for Heraclitus said everything that we experience is in the state of flux the only thing constant is change and his famous metaphor was you can't step into the same river twice why not because if there's a river flowing through and I step my one leg into the river by the time I move the second leg the river has moved on and so the water I plunge my second foot into it isn't the same water that I plunge my first foot into not only that but in an infinitesimal level the bed of that river has changed if only a few unseen atoms have been rearranged and not only that nothing can I not step into the same river twice but the I who is stepping into the same river twice is not the same I that was stepping in it a moment ago I am not the same as I was when I stood up here a few moments ago and talked to John and Roger because that nothing else has changed since then I'm five or ten minutes older and grayer and tired and a few other things if anything defines human existence or the existence of anything creaturely it is change impermanence even that rock under the blowing of the wind and the shining of the Sun and the grains of sand that blow across its surface over eons of time begins to erode and manifest change as it returns to the dust and so instead of the concept of being what Heraclitus substituted was the concept of becoming so we have two distinct distinguish between that which is in a permanent eternal non changing non state of flux being must be distinguished from anything that manifests the characteristics or the attributes of becoming for the ancient Greeks though they weren't embracing the doctrine of the biblical God nevertheless they got some aspects of God right they understood this that being if it is real being must be eternal being must be unchanging being and must be the basis for everything else that is because without being somewhere there can be no becoming let me say it again without being you can't have any becoming because as Aristotle noticed and we don't worship at the shrine of Aristotle contrary to some opinion but what Aristotle understood was it something we're in a pure state of becoming if it was only becoming a nothing else it would be pure potentiality something's totally becoming would be potentially anything but actually nothing now what about God when I was in the sixth grade I played in a baseball league that went up and included 10th graders there are four teams in the town and they had general managers as well as coaches and they pulled off change trades from time to time and I was involved in a multiplayer swap where I was really excited because I was traded from my team to another team for three 10th graders now these three 10th graders among them didn't know whether a baseball was blown up her stuff but I was impressed that here I my a sixth grader getting traded for three 10th graders and the newspaper in our local town this is my first time in the paper announced the trade and they said the Indians traded for the slick fielding shortstop Sonny sproule who lacks a potential back how I hated that word I would hear it from my teachers when my sister was always the smartest kid in the class and three years ahead of me I'd come along behind her and they'd say you're not living up to your potential did you ever hear that I get began to hate the word potentiality and if I'm pure potential and that's all I'm not even worth three tenth graders who can't hit a lick but this is our state of existence becoming not being and this is what differentiates us from God now let me go to my first biblical text briefly where we first encounter this idea it's turn to page 1 in the beginning God created the heavens and the earth this is the most fundamental assertion of historic Christianity and it is the single most bombarded target by secular philosophy and by neo-paganism in our day because every pagan knows that if you can get rid of creation you're rid of God and if you're rid of God you can live however you want and so everything that divides the Christian from the pagan is at stake in that opening assertion of the Old Testament now let's think about this just for a second in the beginning now the first thing is being said here is that the heavens and the earth the entire universe as we know it had a beginning there was a time when the created universe was not I mentioned before a few years ago to conference that I heard the the famous of true physicist jestro being interviewed when the Hubble stage spacecraft was sent aloft and he was on the radio and he said 17 15 to 17 billion years ago the universe exploded into being I almost drove my car off the road when I heard that the universe exploded into being what did it explode out of non-being let me also add to this several years ago I had the opportunity to have exchange correspondence with Carl Sagan and in our correspondence we were talking about Big Bang cosmology and about how the astrophysicists of our day have gone back in time to the last nanosecond before this eternally organized piece of stable condensation of energy and material before it blew up he said that's as far back as we can go and no further and I said to dr. Sagan how can you call yourself a scientist and stop your inquiry into truth at the most important moment in all of history he said well we just don't have to go there I said yeah you do have to go there because you have to account for this singularity this point of singularity that for all eternity was stable and organized immutable in a state of inertia and then suddenly in explicitly on a Tuesday afternoon at 4 o'clock it blows sky-high stop me if online but doesn't in-law of a nurse you say that anything that is at rest tends to remain at rest unless acted upon by an outside force your theory of the origin of the cosmos screams for a self existent eternal being you can't have it without it the minute you say there's a beginning to the universe you've got two options either the universe came out of nothing all by itself or the universe was created by something that is self-existent and eternal that's the only they're the only options folks don't anybody play games with you on this I say it if you want to get a simple grassman let me ask you this question if there was ever a time 15 billion years ago 17 billion years ago 20 billion years ago a hundred billion years ago if there ever was a time when there was nothing no being no becoming no actuality no potentiality just non being nothing yet thus nice what would there be now what could there possibly be now absolutely nothing didn't learn anything else in science and philosophy and in theology you need to learn the absolute principle actually he'll only he'll fit out of nothing nothing comes is why Francis Schaeffer during his career said that the modern naturalist has both of his feet planted firmly in thin air because ultimately once they deny the existence of the self exist an eternal being who has a SIA t their only option is some kind of spontaneous generation which is not science its magic poof the world pops into being or as Joshua says explodes into being I mean have you ever thought about what a tremendous explosion nothingness can cause selected philosopher or the scientist who won the Nobel Peace Prize taught up or a science in physics who taught not in the West Coast wrote an essay I read several years ago where he said the day has arrived in modern physics where we can no longer speak of spontaneous generation things popping into existence out of nothing on their own he said now we have to be more circumspect and understand that for something to come into being out of nothing requires an enormous period of time and so the paradigm shift is this you can't get something out of nothing quickly but if you just have the patience and you wait long enough gradually inexorably this nothing will be able to do something see those are the alternatives to the biblical concept pure unvarnished nonsense I've made you laugh and that's what you should do is laugh at this stuff because it's silly without God there can be no beginning without being there can be no becoming and if there was a beginning nothing screams louder that before the beginning there was not nothing but there was one who has the power of being in himself he has this John mentioned last night life in himself and that's the difference between God and the creature is that God is pure being there is no becoming in God God as we've just heard from Sinclair doesn't have a learning curve he's not learning new things every morning he's not evolving into a higher form of being than he was six months ago or six billion years ago he is as the medieval theologian said the ends perfect kisumu and here for the sake of theology they risk redundancy because that little Latin term means the most perfect being now what's the difference between a perfect being a more perfect being and the most perfect being what is the difference ladies and gentlemen think what is the difference between a perfect being a more perfect being and the most perfect being nothing because if something is perfect in its being that perfection of being admits to no degrees now it's not like the medieval theologians fell asleep when they talked about the most perfect being but they were doing two things they were doing theology noses as Sinclair just said doxology they were standing back in awe at the contemplation of a being in whom resides all excellencies at the perfect degree note lack no weakness nothing missing in that perfect being that exists in and of himself from all eternity I mean if anything drives me to my knees it's even the momentary contemplation of one who is pure eternal self-existent being who needs nothing for my hands nothing from my bank account to exist or to be in his absolute perfection at all time now also in terms of this concept the medieval theologians spoke about an ends necessary Thomas Aquinas for example talked about God as necessary don't tell John Robbins that I just quoted Thomas Aquinas or he'll pour Aquinas oil all over my head forever there were a lot of things about which I believe Thomas Aquinas was wrong this wasn't one of them Thomas speaks about God and his being as necessary being now the way in which the theologians of that period spoke about the necessary being of God was twofold it had two particular reference points to it in the first case I'm trying to find another text that I'll get to in a minute it's in here somewhere in the New Testament there it is in the first case what Aquinas and others meant by necessary being is this that God as eternal perfect self existent being who needs nothing from us for his continuity of existence has necessary being in the sense that a self existent eternal being cannot possibly not be any being that is pure being by necessity is eternal has being in and of himself the Rives is being from nothing outside of himself can never be confused with the creature because the thing that defines us as I say is becoming or as Priscilla Claire was laboring this point about middle knowledge I hope you really tracked with him on this middle knowledge point my wife sure did we walked out of here for a minute and my wife was beside herself she's beating herself in the chest and she says oh I can't stand this to think about the omniscience of God the omniscience of a self existent eternal being who has nothing new to learn he knows all the contingencies of a chess match but he knows nothing contingently God has never said maybe it's going to be this or maybe it's going to be that I have to wait and see how it all works out no he is from everlasting to everlasting and his self existent eternal being includes within it the perfection of his knowledge of his power of his holiness and all the rest of his attributes but me you notice how I'm doing in this thing I can't go from here out the door without having a lady on both arm keeping me up so I don't fall flat on my face you know why because I'm fragile things changed in the back of my head a year ago I might fall down at any second you know why it's because I'm a human becoming and I'm becoming older and weaker right and so on but God doesn't go through that there are no contingencies in his being there's no might have been in who he is he is from everlasting to everlasting pure being perfect Bing and it's a necessary being he never has to stop and tie his shoe the being of God shoes are eternally tied okay now the first reference for this necessary being is this that God is if I can be a technical for just a second if you can't get this Roger will help you that God's being is ontologically necessary that is a self existent eternal being who's dependent upon and derived depend upon nothing for is being derived from nothing upon his being has no contingency in him cannot not be that the very idea of being carries within it conceptually its necessity because that which is always what yes thank you very much he he is by eternal necessity that can never be said of any creature there was a time when you were not there was a time when I was not there was a time when the universe was not but there never was a time when God was not because God cannot not be his being is eternally necessary and so that's one reference in which we speak of the being of God the second one is this that God's being is necessary not only in the ontological sense but his being is necessary in the logical sense this is why I plead with my contemporaries who have abandoned all attempts to prove the existence of God by arguing from a rational basis why give up these unstoppable arguments that the church has deposited in her faith throughout 2,000 years that not only is God's being ontological necessary it's logically necessary that logic demands that you affirm the reality of a self existent eternal being as I said a moment ago because without that nothing could possibly be people say can you prove to me the existence of God and I say yes they say how I said by this pen it's all it takes if this pen exists then God exists unless this pen is God but if anything exists something has to have the power of being within itself or nothing could exist is that clear that's all it takes again if there was ever time that there was nothing what would there be now nothing what could there be now nothing thank you very much but if anything exists something exists that has the power of being within itself if anything exists if there's any becoming somewhere along the way there has to be being because without being there can be no becoming and that being that is the ground of all existence which may have been true for ourselves but it's even more true for Christianity is the Creator God who is from everlasting to everlasting who has the power of life within himself and the power of being within himself and then when Paul speaks to the philosophers as we've already heard at Mars Hill in chapter 17 of the book of Acts quickly that we are told when Paul waited for them at Athens verse 16 his spirit was provoked when he saw that the city was given over to idols Paul walked into the intellectual center of the ancient Greek culture and he got off the tour bus and saying wow look at the Parthenon pose think of the insights of Socrates and Plato and Aristotle hum at the center of the highest level of human achievement of speculative thought now instead his heart was filled with grief because he saw the whole city given to idolatry if you ever good the Athens you ever gone to the Acropolis have you ever stood on the steps of the Parthenon and looked down at this direction over here there's a little bald hill there no ruins nothing there but it's haunted the ghost of the Apostle Paul is on that hill pointing to the Parthenon pointing to the Acropolis speaking the Agora saying I see that in all things you're very religious you got a temple for this a temple for that a temple for this in the case of miss Vesta or Hestia you got one for her and then just be on the safe side to hedge your bets you got this one over here the altar to the unknown God well that what you worship an ignorance I'm going to declare to you in power and then he goes on to give probably the most intense and infallible profound statement in the whole Bible that in him we live and move and have our being real quick last week out in Los Angeles I use an illustration like this I've done it here in other contexts I have this thing that doesn't write and I'm going to make it move you watch me carefully in a moment I'm going to throw it up in the air and try to catch it you ready now you watch at no time will my hands ever leave my wrists okay you keep an eye on that all right all right one two three here we go see that it moved it changed its position and what caused that change you've been taught since you were infants that what caused that change was the inherent power in the strength of my right arm coupled with the strength of gravity to bring it back down these are natural laws that govern everything in the universe at a secondary level that's true but Paul said I can't move a finger without the power of God I can't breathe the breath of life apart from God I cannot exist apart from God because in him is life and in him is my life I'll talk about this tomorrow but God can't die if God ever starts stops living what happens to your life it's over vaporized if God's power of motion ceases remember the game we used to play called statues running around the yard and then somebody says freeze God leaves that's the end of motion that's the end of gravity and if anything should happen to the being of God human becoming becomes potentially everything and actually nothing as we disappear from the face of the earth I mean everything that the Philosopher's of antiquity sought to discern speculatively Paul announced to them at Mars Hill in him we live we move we have our being and in him he lives and moves and has his being we can't live we can't move we can't be apart from him but before we were he lived and moved and was because he has the power of being in himself and that is the transcendent majesty of who he is you know we idolize people in the realm of becoming who reach a higher full of potential than others competitively we look at Michael Jordan we say how can this be we look at Tiger Woods you say how can this be and we're still at the level of becoming we're still at the level of creatureliness and we send to think how great we are until we turn our eyes to heaven the one who is from everlasting to everlasting we owe him whatever participation in being we have and there's creatures we owe the one who is not a creature the glory of the perfection of his very being

Channel: Ligonier Ministries

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Keywords: ligonier, ligonier ministries, ligonier conference, rc sproul, sproul, aseity, causality, being, self existence, ontology, ontological, ontological being, unmoved mover, ligonier conference 2004, attributes of god, before the beginning, before the beginning of time, the aseity of god, what is aseity, understanding aseity, what is ontology, understanding ontology, god is self existent, god is uncaused, god is independent, doctrine of aseity, god is creator, god is redeemer, god

Id: Bj6mZiRRuUU

Length: 47min 55sec (2875 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 08 2015