When he says that God “chose us in Christ _before the foundation of the world_”--or _before founding the world_--this is not a mere mark of time. It intimates that in laying His plans for the world the Creator had the purpose of redeeming grace in view. The kingdom which the “blessed children” of the Father of Christ “inherit,” is the kingdom “_prepared_ for them _from the foundation of the world_” (Matt. xxv. 34). Salvation lies as deep as creation. The provision for it is eternal. For the universe of being was conceived, fashioned, and built up “in Christ.” The argument of Colossians i. 13-22 lies behind these words. The Son of God’s love, in whom and for whom the worlds were made, always was potentially the Redeemer of men, as He was the image of God (Col. i. 14, 15). He looked forward to this mission from eternity, and was in spirit “the Lamb slain from the foundation of the world” (Rev. xiii. 8). Creation and redemption, Nature and the Church, are parts of one system; and in the reconciliation of the cross all orders of being are concerned, “whether the things upon the earth or the things in the heavens.” Evil existed before man appeared on the earth to be tempted and to fall. Through the geological record we hear the voice of creation groaning for long æons in its pain. “Dragons of the prime, That tare each other in their slime,” grim prophets of man’s brutal and murderous passions, bear witness to a war in nature that goes back far towards the foundation of the world. And this rent and discord in the frame of things it was His part to reconcile “in whom and for whom all things were created.” This universal deliverance, it seems, is dependent upon ours. “The creation itself lifts up its head, and is looking out for the revelation of the sons of God” (Rom. viii. 19). In founding the world, foreseeing its bondage to corruption, God prepared through His elect sons in Christ a deliverance the glory of which will make its sufferings to seem but a light thing. “In thee,” said God to Abraham, “shall all the kindreds of the earth be blessed”: so in the final “adoption,--to wit, the redemption of our body” (Rom. viii. 23), all creatures shall exult; and our mother earth, still travailing in pain with us, will remember her anguish no more.