Go! And Trust The God Who Makes Everything Beautiful In Its Time - Ecclesiastes 3:1 Series

Go! And Trust the God Who Makes Everything Beautiful in Its Time

Ecclesiastes 3:11 (NLT): “Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.”

Introduction – The Ache for More

Have you ever felt that deep longing—that ache in your soul—that no matter how much success you achieve, how many experiences you gather, or how many possessions you accumulate, it still doesn’t quite satisfy?

That ache is the imprint of eternity. It is the whisper of God’s Spirit reminding us that we were made for more than this fleeting world. Solomon, in Ecclesiastes, captures this truth with piercing clarity.

Ecclesiastes is not a book written from a naïve perspective. It is penned by Solomon, a man who had tasted everything life could offer—wealth, wisdom, power, pleasure—and yet he declared so much of it “meaningless” without God.

And in chapter 3, verse 11, Solomon makes this staggering statement:

“Yet God has made everything beautiful for its own time. He has planted eternity in the human heart, but even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.”

Here, we find the tension of the human condition: God’s beauty and order in creation, the eternal longing within us, and our limited human vision of His grand plan.

This morning, we will see three vital truths:

God makes everything beautiful in His time.

God has planted eternity in our hearts.

Only in Jesus Christ do we see and experience God’s eternal plan.

1. God Makes Everything Beautiful in His Time

The Hebrew word for “beautiful” here is yapeh (?????), which carries the sense of something fitting, appropriate, and lovely. Solomon is telling us that God, in His sovereignty, orchestrates the events of life so that in His timing, all things are made fitting and right.

Think about Joseph’s story. Betrayed by his brothers, sold into slavery, wrongly imprisoned. And yet at the end of it all, Joseph could say in Genesis 50:20 (NLT):

“You intended to harm me, but God intended it all for good. He brought me to this position so I could save the lives of many people.”

This is the mystery of providence—God weaving beauty out of brokenness.

John Piper once wrote: “God is always doing 10,000 things in your life, and you may be aware of three of them.”

That resonates with me, because often we cannot see the beauty in the moment, but God is at work behind the scenes.

Think of a tapestry. From the underside, it looks messy—threads knotted, colours mismatched. But turn it over, and you see the stunning design. That is our lives in God’s hands. We may see the knots and tangles, but He sees the masterpiece.

For us in the 21st century, when life feels chaotic, when illness strikes, when jobs are lost, when relationships crumble—our comfort is not in our control but in His timing. Trust that His beauty is being woven, even when you cannot yet see it.

2. God Has Planted Eternity in Our Hearts

Solomon continues: “He has planted eternity in the human heart.”

The Hebrew word for “eternity” is ?olam (??????), meaning an unending, everlasting duration. God has placed within us a yearning for the infinite, for something beyond time.

C.S. Lewis described this so beautifully in Mere Christianity: “If I find in myself desires which nothing in this world can satisfy, the only logical explanation is that I was made for another world.”

This longing explains why human beings across cultures, throughout history, have pursued religion, art, philosophy, and science. There is a hunger in the human spirit that cannot be filled by the temporal.

Psalm 42:1–2 (NLT): “As the deer longs for streams of water, so I long for you, O God. I thirst for God, the living God. When can I go and stand before him?”

Just as thirst points to the reality of water, so our spiritual longing points to the reality of God.

Charles Stanley once said: “The Lord plants within us an unquenchable desire to know Him, and until we respond to that desire with faith, we remain restless.”

Imagine a homing pigeon. No matter where it is released, it instinctively knows the way home. Humanity is like that—we are restless wanderers until we find our way back to God.

Many in our culture try to silence this longing with distractions—career, entertainment, possessions. But no matter how much we stuff into that God-shaped hole, only Jesus Christ fills it.

3. Only in Jesus Christ Do We See God’s Eternal Plan

Solomon finishes: “But even so, people cannot see the whole scope of God’s work from beginning to end.”

Our perspective is limited. We see fragments, but God sees the whole. And here lies the Gospel: in Jesus Christ, the eternal God steps into time to reveal His plan.