One Creator

“There is no new thing under the sun.”

Solomon, in Ecclesiastes 1:9

There is only one Creator.  He created a Son first, and then chose to create everything else through that Son (Jn. 1:3), but even at that, the Son was limited to the power the Father gave him.  He could not go beyond it, and he did only what his Father wanted done.  While on earth, the Son openly and repeatedly confessed his utter dependence on God.  He understood well that no one but God is Creator.

In Ecclesiastes 3:11, Solomon made a strange statement.  He said that God has set eternity in men’s hearts, “so that man can’t find out the work that God has done from the beginning even to the end.”  It is a difficult phrase to understand, but I believe that Solomon was pointing out the inescapable fact that we cannot by any means go beyond the universe within which God has created us.  We have no power or wisdom that will take us beyond this creation; we cannot even think of anything beyond it.  In that regard, it can be said that no one has ever had a creative thought.  Only God can think creatively.  All we can do is use our imagination to re-arrange or combine elements of this creation into new shapes.  Solomon suggested this when he said that “God made man upright, but they have sought out many inventions” (Eccl. 7:29).  Men have invented ways to re-arrange or combine elements of God’s creation, but they have never created an element of it, or even thought of one.

This is true of every creature, in heaven or on earth.  Neither angels nor cherubim nor seraphim have ever thought anything except what belongs in this creation.  One may ask, “If Satan never had an original thought, then how could he be ‘the father of lies’, as Jesus said he was?”  The answer is found in the definition of a lie.  A lie is a re-arrangement of elements of the truth (which already exists) for an evil purpose.  For example, when the serpent told Eve that she would not die if she ate the forbidden fruit, he was combining the reality of eternal life with the reality of eating the forbidden fruit, and then telling Eve that those two things went together.  But they did not.  God had already told her so.

The serpent had not created anything; he had only combined two realities in a new way for an evil purpose.  And it worked.  Eve ate the fruit, persuaded her husband to do the same, and they both began to die.  All liars, that is, all who are like Satan, the father of lies, use the truth to their own ends.  In fact, the truth is the only thing they have with which to begin their evil work.

We have only one Creator.  He alone has thoughts that are not of this creation.  He alone has the wisdom to think of something not in this creation, and the power to bring it into existence, out of nothing.  And thankfully, He has revealed Himself through His Son Jesus, who came to bear witness of the truth, not to re-arrange it.