Everything is Beautiful in Its Time

Ecclesiastes 3:11 “He has made everything beautiful in its time. Also He has put eternity in their hearts, except that no one can find out the work that God does from beginning to end.”

Who knows where we go (soul & spirit) when our bodies pass? What happens in eternity; let alone what tomorrow brings here? Yet, this Sovereign Almighty Omnipotent Creator God has put the knowledge of that eternity in our hearts, so that we can see and know purpose to say “He has made everything beautiful in its time” today. I read a great teaching that in the verses of Ecclesiastes 3:2-8 appears a remarkable listing of 28 “times,” arranged in 14 pairs of opposites (e.g., “a time to be born, and a time to die,” v. 2). The entire section is introduced by God’s definitive statement: “To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven” (v. 1). It is then climaxed by His remarkable assurance in the words of our text for the day. Everything that God has made is beautiful in its appropriate time—even death and war, killing and hating, and all the other “negatives” in the list, as well as the 14 “positives”—healing and loving, building and planting, and many others. How often do we think of any negative in life as of God’s control, will, way and plan? 

Isaiah 55:7-9 “ Let the wicked forsake his way and the unrighteous man his thoughts; And let him return to the Lord, and He will have compassion on him, and to our God, for He will abundantly pardon. “For My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways My ways,” declares the Lord. “For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are My ways higher than your ways and My thoughts than your thoughts.”

The lesson states that since all our “times” are “in thy hand” – Psalm 31:15, it is fitting to recognize that the appropriate time for “every purpose under heaven” is His time—God’s time. Thus, everything that God has made is, in fact, beautiful when accomplished in His own time, in His way, as set forth in His Word. We may not understand many things in our time, for “no man can find out the work that God maketh from the beginning to the end.” Nevertheless, when God made us, He “set the world in our hearts,” so that the very deepest roots of our nature assure us that God exists and cares. The Hebrew word for “world”, αἰών (aiōn) in Greek, means forever, an unbroken age, perpetuity of time, eternity; literally, that “world without end”. Thus, all that happens to us, if accepted and applied according to God’s Word, becomes beautiful, and “we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose” – Romans 8:28.

In Christ, Brian