Since the New Testament distinctly ascribes the work of creation to the official Person called the Logos and the Christ, and, in harmony with the Old, demonstrates his identity with Jehovah, Elohim, and the Messenger Jehovah, it may justly occasion surprise and deserve inquiry, how it has happened that the Old Testament has, both by Jews and Christians, so long and so generally been construed, as in our own and other modern translations, to ascribe those works, not to Him, personally or officially, but to the Father, or to the Deity irrespective of any personal distinctions or official relations. As preliminary to this inquiry, it may be observed, that the office which belonged to him in his delegated character was constituted before the creation of the world. That office included the redemption of his people, who were chosen in him before the creation. His relation to them, therefore, did not commence after the fall, nor after the creation. For his official work includes the work of redemption; and since those to be redeemed were before the creation chosen in him, whatever in his mediatorial person, office and character belongs to him as their Redeemer, must have been constituted prior to the work of creation. And since the works of creation and providence had, and continue to have, an intimate connection with the work of redemption, and are in some things identical with that work, we must conclude that whatever belongs officially to his person and character was constituted prior to the creation; and that the covenant transaction, in which the second person of the Trinity was appointed and undertook to be the Redeemer, comprised all that appertains to the constitution of his person and office as Mediator; so that thenceforth he was in a capacity to act officially in his delegated character as Mediator, as truly and perfectly as at any subsequent period. The connection and consistency of the entire plan of creation, providence, and redemption, in its relations to him in the progress of its execution, require this conclusion; and hence the particularity and emphasis with which the apostles, in setting forth his prerogatives as Mediator and Redeemer, for the conviction of those who saw him only as man, assert that he was in the beginning--_i. e._, in the delegated official character which they then ascribed to him; that he was before all things; that by him all things consist; that in the beginning he laid the foundation of the earth, created the heavens and the earth, brought into existence all creatures visible and invisible; that he was in respect to the entire system the Alpha and Omega, First and Last. Their object required that all this should be believed of him in the official person and character in which for the suffering of death he appeared incarnate. _It was in no respect to their purpose_ to assert of him that _as Divine_, or in his _Divine nature_, he existed prior to the creation, and exercised creative power.