"Thus says the LORD, your Redeemer, and the one who formed you from the womb, 'I, the LORD, am the maker of all things, Stretching out the heavens by Myself And spreading out the earth all alone.'"
— Isaiah 44:24 (NASB95)

This is the sharpest objection in the whole doctrine of creation, and it deserves to be stated at full strength rather than softened.

Isaiah says that Yahweh made everything, that He stretched out the heavens by Himself, that He spread out the earth all alone. The Hebrew piles the exclusivity on until there is no room left. Then the New Testament turns around and says that all things came into being through Jesus Christ, that nothing came into being apart from Him. Either Isaiah is wrong that God worked alone, or the New Testament is wrong that the Son made everything — or Christians are quietly running two contradictory claims side by side and hoping nobody checks.

That is the objection. Jehovah's Witnesses press it, Muslim apologists press it, and unitarian readers of every stripe press it. It is a good objection. It also has an answer, and getting to that answer requires being honest about one argument Christians commonly use here that will not survive contact with someone who reads Hebrew.

What Isaiah 44:24 Actually Says

The verse is built from a chain of Hebrew participles, each one naming something God does: the one who made all things, the one who stretched out the heavens, the one who spread out the earth. Isaiah stacks them to overwhelm.

‎לְבַדִּי (lĕbaddî, "by Myself"; BDB 94) is the emphatic word. It means separately, in isolation, with no one else involved.

Then comes a detail the English translations mostly bury. Gary Smith points out that the verse does not actually end with a statement in Hebrew — it ends with a rhetorical question: literally, "Who was with me?" The NIV, he notes, "renders this paraphrastically 'by myself.'"^[1] The last word of Isaiah 44:24 is a challenge thrown at the reader: name someone who was there helping.

Smith's comment on the three participles is exactly right, and it is worth quoting because it identifies precisely what the verse excludes:

"He is the one who 'all alone' stretched out (the second participle) the heavens like a tent cloth (40:22; 48:13). No other gods did this, and none helped him with this work."^[2]

No other gods. That is the category Isaiah is ruling out, and the context proves it. Isaiah 40–48 is a sustained polemic against the Babylonian pantheon. The chapters immediately around this verse are wall-to-wall idol satire — the craftsman who cuts down a tree, burns half of it for warmth, roasts his dinner over it, and bows down to the leftover block (Isaiah 44:14–17). The rival on Isaiah's mind is Marduk, not the Son of God.

This matters because, in the Babylonian creation account, the world is made through divine conflict and cooperation: a committee of gods, a struggle, a corpse split into sky and sea. Isaiah's "by Myself" is a direct strike at that picture. He is not answering a question nobody in Babylon was asking about internal distinction within the one God. He is saying: there was no pantheon, no assistant deity, no rival, no committee.

Why That Alone Does Not Settle It

Here is where a lot of apologetics stops, and it should not. Saying "Isaiah only excludes other gods" is true but incomplete, because the objector will immediately reply: fine — and Jesus is other than the Father, so which is he, a god or a helper?

The answer has to come from what the New Testament actually claims, and the claim is stranger and stronger than "Jesus helped."

John 1:3 states it twice, once positively and once negatively: "All things came into being through Him, and apart from Him nothing came into being that has come into being." The double formulation is doing deliberate work. It closes every exception. There is no created thing standing outside the Son's creative activity — which means the Son cannot Himself be one of the created things. A creature cannot be the agent through whom all creatures came to be without creating himself, which is incoherent.

Paul makes the same move with three prepositions in Colossians 1:16: all things were created in Him, through Him, and for Him. Richard Melick draws out what the middle one means in practice — Christ "is the effective agent of creation," and Paul says so "consistently with other biblical writers," pointing to John 1 and Hebrews 1 as the parallels.^[3] The third preposition is the one that should end the discussion: creation exists for Christ. As Melick puts it, "Jesus is the goal of all creation. Everything exists to display his glory."^[4]

No one in Scripture says the universe was made for an angel, for a servant, or for a creature. Things are made for God. If the universe exists for Christ, Christ is not on the creature side of the line.

Melick states the conclusion about the disputed title "firstborn" more crisply than most:

"The term 'firstborn' distances Jesus from creation rather than subsumes him under it."^[5]

That is the whole grammar of the answer. Isaiah's "by Myself" excludes anyone standing outside God and lending a hand. The New Testament does not put the Son outside God lending a hand. It puts Him inside the single creative act, as the one through whom and for whom that act occurs. Two prepositions, no second creator.

Isaiah 44:24 and John 1:3 make the same exclusive claim. The question is not whether both can be true. The question is what it tells you about the Son that the New Testament is comfortable making Isaiah's exclusive claim about Him. The deity of Christ in John's Gospel and the Colossians hymn are each worked out at length elsewhere; the point here is narrower — the exclusivity texts do not stand against them.

The Argument to Retire: Proverbs 8:22

Christians answering this objection often reach for Proverbs 8:22–31, where Wisdom speaks of being at God's side "as a master workman" when the world was made. The argument runs: Wisdom is a pre-figuration of Christ; Christ is the Wisdom of God (1 Corinthians 1:30); therefore, Proverbs 8 shows the Son present at creation, and the Hebrew verb in v. 22 means "possessed," not "created."

This argument should be dropped, for three reasons.

First, the verb is genuinely disputed, and not in our favor. ‎קָנָה (qānāh; BDB 888; HALOT 1111) can mean "acquire," "possess," or "create/beget," and the choice is a judgment call, not a lexical certainty. Roland Murphy's Word Biblical Commentary translates the line "The Lord begot me at the beginning of his ways."^[6] Claiming "possessed" is the obvious rendering, in front of someone holding a standard critical commentary that renders it "begot," is how an apologetic argument dies in public.

Second, the ancient Arians used this text too — on the other side. Proverbs 8:22 in the Greek Old Testament reads ektisen me ("created me"), and it was one of the primary Arian proof texts precisely because it appeared to make the pre-incarnate Son a creature. A verse that has served as ammunition for the position you are refuting is a poor foundation for refuting it.

Third, and decisively, the New Testament never applies Proverbs 8:22 to Christ. Not once. The apostles quote the Old Testament constantly and creatively, and they had every opportunity. They reached for Genesis 1:1 (John 1:1), for Psalm 102:25–27 (Hebrews 1:10–12), for Psalm 110:1 constantly. They did not reach for Proverbs 8. Building a doctrine on a connection the apostles declined to make, while an obvious alternative reading sits in every commentary, is not a strong position — it is an exposed one.

Proverbs 8 is a magnificent poem about the wisdom by which God ordered the world, personified as a woman calling in the streets (Proverbs 8:1–4). Read it as that, and it is untouched by this controversy. Press it into service as a Christological proof text, and it becomes a liability that a prepared opponent will use against you. The case for Christ as Creator does not need it and is stronger without it. Some of the arguments urged against the Jehovah's Witness position depend on this text; those particular arguments should be set aside, not the conclusion they were defending.

What the Objection Gets Right

The objection is right that Scripture will not tolerate a second creator. It is right that "God plus a helper" is a pagan idea, and it is right that Isaiah slams the door on it. Any Christology that makes the Son a junior partner in creation — a very great creature who did the actual construction while the Father supervised — is refuted by Isaiah 44:24, and refuted decisively.

What the objection assumes, and does not prove, is that any distinction between Father and Son must be a distinction between Creator and creature. Isaiah never says that. He says there was no one with God — no external collaborator, no rival deity, no pantheon. The New Testament agrees, and then says the one creative act belongs to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit (Genesis 1:2; Psalm 33:6; John 1:3; Colossians 1:16). One act, one Creator, one glory.

"Who was with Me?" Isaiah asks. The Christian answer is not the Son was with You, helping. The Christian answer is: no one was with You — and the Son is not "no one," He is how You did it. That is what the origin of the universe looks like when the whole canon is allowed to speak, and it is why the same Scripture that forbids a second creator hands the Son the honors of the first.