Isaiah 44:24 and Jesus as Creator By Andrew Davis

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Isaiah 44:24 and Jesus as Creator 

Thus says YHVH, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb,

“I, YHVH, am the maker of all things,

Stretching out the heavens by Myself

And spreading out the earth all alone,”

Isaiah 44:24, NASB

In this verse, we see YHVH, God Almighty, the God of Israel, testifies to the truth that He is the Maker of all things. As this verse is typically interpreted, it says that YHVH did this alone, by Himself, without the assistance or aid of another.

Trinitarians make an interesting argument using this verse:

P1) If YHVH alone created all things, and

P2) Jesus Christ was involved in the creation of all things, then

C) it follows that Jesus Christ is YHVH, the one God.

Trinitarians seem to have overlooked something very important in this verse though:
YHVH is described here as only one person.
That’s no mere assumption, but something we can clearly see from the passage itself:
YHVH is obviously a single individual being here (“the one”), and as this being both speaks and intelligently creates, this being meets the definition of a person (a person is by definition a rational individual being). Not only does YHVH here obviously meet the standard definition of a person, but the language He uses to speak of Himself is expressly singular and personal, clearly communicating by this grammar that He is a single person. YHVH here is a “Who”, an “I”, “the Maker” (not Makers), and He says He has stretched out the heavens “by Myself”.
It is beyond doubt that YHVH described in this verse is a single person.

But here we see the problem this poses for trinitarians: this argument would not prove
a multi-personal triune God, but a uni-personal God who is both Father and Son; that is, given that YHVH is only one person here, the argument presented above would prove modalism, not trinitarianism, if true. If YHVH is not only a single being but also a single person, as we saw above, and this person YHVH is identified with the Father (which no one denies), then proving that Jesus Christ is also this same YHVH will have proved too much - the Father and Son will be one and the same person. The trinitarian argument fails then, precisely because its end result is not actually trinitarian at all.

It gets worse for the trinitarian though: if we follow the logic of this argument in reverse, we find that this proves that Jesus is not YHVH, the one God. That is, we know from the Bible that the Father and Son are not the same person - and trinitarians openly acknowledge this. So if this argument gets us to this false conclusion, then there must be something wrong with the trinitarian syllogism. Either the argument itself isn’t valid (its conclusion does not follow from the premises), or else, if it is valid, then since we agree the conclusion is false (since the conclusion is modalism), then we must also agree that the argument must be unsound: at least one premise must be false.

If we examine the trinitarian syllogism, we find that the argument is valid: if YHVH alone created the universe, and Jesus created the universe, then Jesus is YHVH. The logic here works, and it’s necessarily true that if each premise is true, then the conclusion that Jesus is a uni-personal YHVH, and so by extension, is the Father, must be true. Since that conclusion is agreed by both trinitarians and unitarians to be false, that means that for sure, at least one premise of the trinitarian argument must be false.

I would suggest that the first premise is just too clear to deny; we have the verse this is proved from, Isaiah 44:24, right in front of us in this discussion. YHVH says that He alone, by Himself, made all things - what more could YHVH have said to communicate that He alone, by Himself, without the aid of any other, made all things, had He wanted to communicate this?
Premise one is sound, and we may note, is already agreed upon by both trinitarians and Biblical Unitarians.

That only leaves premise two then as the culprit, which say that Jesus created the universe; we are forced to the conclusion that Jesus didn’t actually create the universe. We can actually restructure and modify the trinitarian syllogism to show this more clearly:

P1) If YHVH alone created the universe;

P2) and YHVH is only one person;

P3) and YHVH is the Father;

P4) and the Father is not the Son

C) then it follows that the Son did not create the universe, and is not YHVH, God Almighty.

Since trinitarians acknowledge P1, P3, and P4, they would probably try to deny P2; but as we saw above, the text of scripture doesn’t allow for this. P1 and P2 are both equally clear from Isaiah 44:24, and the verse cannot be used as proof of P1, without also proving P2. That means that the argument is sound, and the conclusion follows:
Jesus, the Son of God, did not create the universe, and is not YHVH, God Almighty. Rather, the Maker of all things, YHVH, the one God, is one person only, the Father alone.

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Isaiah 44:24 and Jesus as Creator