Paper is a wonderful product of a thousand uses, but where did it come from? How was it invented, and by whom? Well, people who investigate that sort of thing credit the Chineese with the invention of paper, about the beginning of the Second Century A.D.1
But we must share with you that the Chinese were not the first makers of paper. They were “Johnny-come-latelies” on the paper scene, some thousands of years after the real inventors. For the genuine first makers of paper were not people at all, but wasps. The descendants of those wasps are still in the same business, still making their homes out of tissue-thin paper.
In the tropics, some of these nests become quite large, housing thousands of wasps. But in regions of killing winter frost, only the queens hibernate and survive to start new colonies in the spring.
After her awakening, the queen wasp will find some well-seasoned wood, such as an old log or post, and scrape fibers of wood from its surface with her jaws. She then makes paper in her mouth, simply by chewing. The process is quite comparable – on a very small scale – to modern paper making factories, where wood chips are reduced to a mash of fibers, which are then formed and dried into paper.
Since the queen wasp is all alone, she must do all the work of starting the nest. First she builds a foundation upon a twig or bough or in a cavity of a tree, and from this she builds down, adding a mouthful at a time. When she has completed half a dozen cells, the queen lays an egg in each.
Worker wasps hatch from these eggs, and after the queen has fed and cared for them through the grub stage, they take over the tasks of nest building and nursing the grubs as they hatch. The queen then retires from the working force and henceforth devotes all her energies to producing eggs.
Of course the paper-making wasps didn’t really invent paper. They didn’t even discover it; for both invention and discovery involve reasoning processes. Wasps simply do what they have done from the very beginning without ever once thinking about it. Paper-making in their case is purely instinctive. In other words, it is part of the style or manner of life for which they were equipped when they first came into the world.
But how were they equipped, and by whom? To ask this is to seek after the real inventor of paper – and of all else upon earth and under the earth. There is only One who possesses the wisdom as well as the power to create our world in all its diversity. That One is God.
Hear the word from the prophet Jeremiah: “He (that is God) has made the earth by his power, he has established the world by his wisdom, and by his understanding has he stretched out the heavens…” (Jeremiah 10:12) The paper-making wasps are but one of myriads of confirming witnesses to the prophet’s testimony.
Job urges us to heed the evidence of nature: “But ask the animals, now, and they shall teach you; the birds of the sky, and they shall tell you. Or speak to the earth, and it shall teach you. The fish of the sea shall declare to you. Who doesn’t know that in all these, the hand of Yahweh has done this, in whose hand is the life of every living thing, and the breath of all mankind?” (Job 12:7-12)
It is never enough to simply know that God created us. We were created to know and acknowledge and love Him.
(All Scripture is quoted from the World English Bible translation.)