August 18

“There is a time for everything, a season for every activity under heaven” (Ecclesiastes 3:1). No one knows better than God the importance of proper timing. When He promises judgment, judgment will come, in God’s time. When He promises blessings, blessings will come, in God’s time. God is not bound to do things by our finite concepts of timing. God does everything in His own time (I Timothy 6:15; II Peter 3:9) and He always has a perfect reason for why He does what He does and when He does it.
False prophets had been prophesying peace for Israel, while God’s true prophets had been predicting Israel’s impending doom. People always listen to what they want to hear. They did not want to hear about impending doom so they gravitated toward those prophets who were foretelling peace rather than those who were foretelling destruction. Since destruction had not come, God’s people assumed that it either would not come or that destruction was still a long ways off. Through the prophet, Ezekiel, God said, “give them this message from the Sovereign Lord: No more delay! I will now do everything I have threatened!.....For I am the Lord! What I threaten always happens. There will be no more delays, you rebels of Israel! I will fulfill my threat of destruction in your own lifetime says the Lord......The time has come for every prophecy to be fulfilled!” (12:28,25, 23).
What was true then is still true today. We must not mistake God’s delay, which is evidence of His mercy, for God somehow being forgetful. “God is not a man, that He should lie. He is not a human, that He should change His mind. Has He ever spoken and failed to act? Has He ever promised and not carried it through?” (Numbers 23:19). So, when God promises to do something, we can be sure that He will do it. It’s all about timing. And God’s time is always the right time.