Ecclesiastes 3:11: “He hath made everything beautiful in His time.”

“I think I am beginning to understand it.”   Pierre Augusta Renoir

The great impressionist painter, Renoir, was fascinated with beauty and spent his life trying to understand what made something beautiful. An impressionist painter devoted him or herself to a study of beauty.  To him the rose was the most beautiful flower and he painted it often.  He found it to be so beautiful; yet, he could not understand why it was beautiful.  He spent his life painting this flower over and over trying to understand its beauty.  Was it its deep rich color, or its lines, or its shape?  Renoir died at the age of 78.  On the day that he died he was again painting a rose.  His housekeeper brought his lunch to him and overheard him mutter to himself, “I think I am beginning to understand it.”

I was pushing a man around in a wheel chair today who is an artist and has studied art on a university level. I asked him what he thought Renoir meant when he said “I think I am beginning to understand it?” The artist laughed and said, “I guess he finally began to understand what made the flower beautiful.” I remember  one art historian said something that I believe reveals the real thoughts of Renoir on the day he died.  He probably sensed he was going to die and when he did his mind turned to his creator.  It was then that he realized why the rose was so beautiful and why he could never capture the true beauty of a rose in his paintings.  He realized that it was God who created all beauty and that the beauty he saw in the rose was really the beauty of God and he could never re-create the beauty that God created.  He realized that beauty can contain a supernatural element.

God will make everything beautiful in His time.  The word time in Hebrew is be’tho which could come from the root word ba’th which means to come upon without warning.  You could render this as “He has made everything beautiful and it will come upon you without warning.”   However, I think I will join in lock step with everyone else and say the root word is ’adah which could mean to adorn oneself or time or season.    Perhaps you could render this as: “He will make everything beautiful and will adorn himself with that beauty.   That is an interesting thought, God will not only make everything beautiful, once He does, and He will use that beauty to adorn himself.   He will not only make us beautiful, once he has accomplished making us beautiful, He will then adorn Himself with us.

I am beginning to realize that after three score years and five years on this earth, God has been really working hard to make me beautiful, now that I am growing old and ugly, it is now He starts to make me beautiful.  Well, good timing I need an inward beauty to make up for my lack of outward beauty. With what time I have left on this planet, it is about time He starts to adorn Himself with His work.  Thus, everything I do now is to just find opportunities to let Him shine through me.

But that begs the question, what is beauty?   Just what can be beautiful about this dusty old professor after three score and five years?  The word beauty in Hebrew is yepah which means, of all things, beauty.  It can also mean good or appropriate.   I am not happy with that, I want to have some sort of beauty at this late stage of the game.  I mean just what kinds of beauty can a guy with this mug adorn God with?

We will need to look at this word yepah  a little more closely. The word yepah is spelled Yod, Pei, Hei.   The Yod speaks of setting one’s priorities straight, in other words to do justly, love kindness; walk humbly before your God (Micah 6:8).  God will adorn Himself with the good works that grow out of knowing Him and loving Him.

The next letter in the word for beauty is the Pei.  I hear the Pei calling me, do you hear it calling you?  It is calling me to speak words of purity and righteousness. The Pei whispers to me to speak of the lovingkindness of God, to speak the heart of God.  This brings me to the last letter in beauty and that is the Hei.  Ah the Hei, I hear it commanding me to listen to that still small voice.   It is in that still small voice that I will hear the message that I am to speak and reflect in my behavior.  When I do, I may not be physically beautiful outside, but hopefully others will see a beauty inside me, a beauty that is Jesus Christ who lives inside of me.

What about that still small voice?  I remember as a child attending a baseball game at Wrigley Field to watch the Chicago Cubs play.  We sat way back in the stands behind home plate.  The cheapest seats in the house.  People around me were talking, shouting, laughing and making all kinds of noises.  Yet I discovered that even sitting way back in the upper levels of those stands, that if I focus my attention on the umpire and block out all the noises around me, I could actually hear that umpire shout “strike” or “ball” or even “out.”   That is how we hear that still small voice, we just block out all of life’s distractions and just focus our attention on God and we may actually hear him say: “Safe!”  Sure God could speak to us in the midst of all the

So what is God going to adorn Himself with?  If we listen to His still small voice we will hear just what it is we are to say and do and when we say and do what that still small voice is asking,  we will adorn our Savior with a beautiful necklace or piece of Jewelry from our words and actions.  We will truly be a beautiful person, maybe not on the outside, but people will be so taken by what is inside hopefully they will ignore what they see on the outside.

After threescore years and five years, I think I am beginning to understand it.