1 Peter 1:20

who verily was foreordained Literally, foreknown, but the foreknowledge of God implies the foreordaining. Here also we note the coincidence with St Peter's language in Acts 2:23; Acts 3:18. The Greek for "these last times" is literally the end of the times. The Apostle's language was determined probably in part by the prophecy of Joel which he cites in Acts 2:17, in part by his belief that with the manifestation of Christ in the flesh, the last period of God's dealings with mankind, the duration of which it was not given to him to measure, had actually begun. In the thought that the foreknowledge of God was "before the foundation of the world," we have the very phrase which St Peter had heard from our Lord's lips in Matthew 25:34; Luke 11:50; John 17:24, and which he may have read with the same force as in this passage in Ephesians 1:4.