A supplement to the several discourses upon various divine subjects

(1.) If you regard it as his main design in the Creation of the world. Can we think God made the world for the worlds sake, that he pitched tabernacles here for a few creatures, that could spell from all his works but a few and little letters of his name? Could the bare creation show to man so much as his back parts? The most glorious perfections of his Nature could never be visible in a handful of creatures, though never so glorious, no nor in multitudes of worlds of a more beautiful aspect, without the discovery of the Gospel, and the settling a Gospel Church. How should we have known his patience, been instructed in his mercy, have had any sense of his grace, or understood the depths of his wisdom or heard the voice of the bowels of his love, so as they are linked together in his nature? If God created the world for his glory, he created it for his highest glory; a bare creation without a redeemed company of creatures, could never have given us a prospect of the great glory of his Nature, nor have answered the end of God, which was the manifestation of his perfections. His wisdom broke out in the frame of all creatures giving them life and motion; but his eye, when he made the world, was upon the manifestation of a greater wisdom which then lay hid in his bosom, and was not to be discovered but in the publishing the Gospel. Ephes. 3.9.10. The wisdom that broke out in the creation, was but a scaffold, whereon in time his wisdom in the glory of a Church peculiar to himself should appear. All things were created for Christ as well as by him, for him and his glory as Mediator and as Head of the Church, and therefore for the glory of his body. And his end in sending Christ was to gather all things together in him; those things which are in Heaven as well as those which are on earth, Eph. 1.10. And in order to that end he works all things^*. This counsel and will of appointing Christ was the spring and rule of all his works, and therefore of creation, as well as the rest succeeding it. He that would upon occasion give the richest parts of the world for the ransom of Zion, as Egypt Ethiopia Seba, Isa. 23.43. may well be thought to create those and other nations to lay a foundation for her. We know that soon after the Creation the rest of God was disturbed by the entrance of sin, which could not come unexpected, unforeseen and unpermitted.