He Makes All Things Beautiful...

...in His Time

The Bible frequently employs the image of a tree which yields its fruit in its time/season. One place in which it does so is the outset of the book of Psalms, in Psalm 1. The man who doesn’t fall into temptation, but meditates on God’s law, is like a fruitful tree.

Psalm 1’s use of different verbal forms is instructive. The terms I’ll use here to describe them aren’t technically correct, but they should get the basic point across.

The verbal forms in the first two verses of Psalm 1 don’t refer to a particular point in time; rather, they’re habitual. They describe the general way of the righteous man: what he doesn’t do (follow the wicked) and what he does do (meditates on God’s word).

With the word וְהָיָה (‘he will be’: verse 3), the Psalmist then turns his attention to the future. To be precise, he describes the respective futures of the folk described in verses 1 and 2. Every subsequent verb in the Psalm thus has a future form (a yiqtol form)…

…until we get to its last verse, where we are told ‘God knows’ (יוֹדֵעַ), which is the only present tense verb in the whole Psalm. The righteous won’t always have things their own way, but, as they go through them, God knows their trials; and, even though they haven’t come to pass, God knows the respective futures of the righteous and the wicked.

The Psalm’s distinction between singulars and plurals is also instructive. At the Psalm’s conclusion, a multitude of righteous individuals are gathered into God’s presence (צדיקים, a plural) (1.5–6). Prior to that, however, the Psalm describes the walk of a single righteous man, whose status is contrasted with that of the many wicked folk by which he’s beset in life.

The same distinction is implicit in Psalm 2. The ‘nations’, ‘peoples’, and ‘kings of the earth’ (plural) gather together and plot against God’s Messiah (singular). And the situation is made explicit in Psalm 3: ‘O Lord, how many are my foes! Many are rising against me. Many are saying of my soul, There is no salvation for him in God’.

Psalm 1 thus finds its ultimate fulfilment in the Messiah—the only truly Righteous One. Yet it finds a number of partial fulfilments in the Messiah’s predecessors. Consider, by way of example, the life of Joseph. Like the king of Psalm 2, many people plot against Joseph. They don’t much care for his claims to greatness, and seek to cast his cords away from them. Joseph, however, remains stedfast. Although temptation comes day by day (יום יום: Gen. 39.10), he refuses to walk in the way of the wicked (Psa. 1.1). His daily delight is in the law of the LORD. (‘How can I sin against God!?’) The short term consequences of Joseph’s obedience aren’t good; he’s not only thrown in a pit for his troubles, but also in a prison.

Yet God has a plan for Joseph’s life. Joseph is destined to be ‘a fruitful bough’ (Gen. 49.24) and to bear fruit in his appointed season—‘choice fruit in summer (תְּבוּאֹת שָׁמֶשׁ)’ and ‘rich produce each month (גֶּרֶשׁ יְרָחִים)’ (Deut. 33.14). And bear fruit Joseph does. He is raised up from the pit; he bears a son named Ephraim (אֶפְרָיִם) = ‘fruitful’; and he’s even brought fruit by his brothers (43.11). Just as the man of Psalm ‘prospers in all he does’ (כל אשר יעשה יצליח), so too does Joseph (אשר הוא עושה יהוה מצליח) (Gen. 39.23). God’s chosen man is thus exalted (Psa. 2.6). The nations kiss him (‘Kiss the Son lest he be angry!’: Gen. 41.10, Psa. 2.12). And, when a Pharaoh arises who doesn’t reverence Joseph, he soon perishes in the way (Exod. 1ff.).

With these things in mind, let’s move on to consider another text where things are said to come to fruition ‘in their time’ (בְּעִתּוֹ).

There’s a time for every activity under the sun, Solomon tells us: a time to be born and a time to die, to weep and to laugh, to mourn and to dance (Eccl. 3).¹

At the end of the above list of activities, Solomon asks an important question: Why bother (מָה־יִּתְרוֹן)? What difference does what we do ultimately make? Solomon’s asked that question before. In fact, it’s the very first question he asks in the book of Ecclesiastes (1.3). Life is like a balance sheet. One generation passes away and another one arises in its place; the wind blows southwards, and then it returns to the north again. Hence, when you add up life’s activities at the end of the day, the net result is zero. Nothing ultimately makes any difference. So why bother to do it in the first place?

At first blush, Solomon’s list of activities in chapter 3 seems to be plagued by a similar futility. On closer inspection, however, it’s not a balance sheet, but a rich tapestry. There’s a time to weep and a time to laugh, a time to mourn and a time to dance. The tears don’t cancel out the laughter, and the laughter doesn’t cancel out the tears. Likewise, the mourning doesn’t cancel out the dancing or the dancing the mourning. Each is appropriate in its time. At times, it’s good and right to weep and mourn, and at times it’s good and right to laugh and dance. And that’s what Solomon comes to see in 3.10: ‘God has made everything beautiful in its/his time’.

But at what ‘time’ exactly? *When* will we come to see the beauty of all things? In a nutshell, on the day of the resurrection. The resurrection is the time when all of life will make sense, and all of life will not make sense *until* that day. We’ll no doubt enjoy glimpses of God’s big picture over the course of our lives, in mini-resurrections and foreshadows of that great Day. When Joseph was pulled out of the pit (בּוֹר) in the desert, he understood *some* of God’s purposes. When he was pulled out of the dungeon (בּוֹר) in Egypt, he understood *more* of God’s purposes. And when his bones were finally carried out of Egypt, millions of Jacob’s descendants saw what God had done in and through Joseph’s life and times--when Joseph had been born and when Joseph had been reckoned as dead, when he’d sought to carve out a future for himself in Egypt and when his future looked to have been taken away, when he and his father had wept and when they’d embraced.

The same was true of Jesus’ life. The resurrection was the time when Jesus’ life came into focus--when his words were fulfilled and his silence before Pilate made sense, when he was demonstrated not to be a blasphemer but the Son of God, when he was no longer dismissed as the one who *should* have redeemed Israel but the One who *would* redeem Israel (Luke 24). And the same will be true for us: the resurrection will be the day when *our* lives finally make sense--when each body is assigned its own particular glory (1 Cor. 15), when we see why we’ve been made to go through all our trials in life, when our tears are wiped away, our sorrows turned to joy, our tribulations recompensed a thousand times over, and God has made all things beautiful in his good time.

In the absence of the resurrection, we’ve believed in vain and we’ll live in vain (1 Cor. 15.2, 14), which is the vanity described in Ecclesiastes 1. And yet by God’s grace we’ve not believed in vain. ‘Therefore, my beloved brothers, be steadfast, immovable, always abundant in the work of the Lord, conscious that in the Lord your labour is not in vain’ (1 Cor. 15.58).

1. I don’t personally make much use of the last of these times, but the issue is one of personal inability rather than theological conviction.