R.C Sproul explains God’s “being” and how an understanding of this truth can be used powerfully in apologetics.

Transcript

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 you know what the real difference is between God and me? His 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 dependent, it’s contingent, it’s derived, it’s a subset of pure being. That’s what the 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. Aristotle understood that. For anything to move in this world, it has to be moved by something other than itself. So even our motion depends on the being of God. “In Him, we live and move and have our being.”

Let me just say this—we debate all 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 indomitably and compelling 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 oceans.

What could there possibly now?

Nothing.