I’ve always loved this promise from Isaiah 11:
They [the cobra/viper] will neither harm nor destroy on all my holy mountain, for the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
But it wasn’t until recently that it was linked to God’s directive for fathers (Ephesians 6) by a visiting friend from Germany:
Fathers, do not exasperate your children; instead, bring them up in the training and instruction of the Lord.
He was saying (if I remember correctly) that in the original language this has a flavor of helping them to see the glory of the Lord in everything around them. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t know, but it helped me make a link between my directive as a father and the coming pervasive knowledge of the Lord in Isaiah 11. Actually, I prefer the wording in Habakkuk 2:
For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
This clarification (“knowledge of the glory of the LORD”) reminds me that the goal is not a dry intellectual or academic knowledge, but a knowledge of His glory — the kind that inspires worship. Like when I help my kids see God’s glory in how a collapsing star goes supernova and forms a neutron star or, if it’s very heavy, forms a supermassive black hole — the kind found in the center of most galaxies. Or to see God’s glory in the gospel: the unthinkable condescension of the creator towards our rebel human race in killing His beloved Son for our crimes.
May our homes (and the Lord knows how far I have to go in this) be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the Lord as a faint preview of what we will soon witness: the submersion of the entire earth — every city, every inhabitant — in the full knowledge of His glory.
Some good thoughts, timely for me as I got my first kid due Dec. 1.
Also, I was just in Bellingham a few months ago for my brother’s wedding! He lives in Lynden, and is a total nerd, loves sci-fi and fantasy, and games (board, pen and paper RPG), I guess I rubbed off on him. He went to Masters too.
OK so I started checking out your blog and stuff, and the overlap in our areas of interest is scarily extensive. I’m working as a network administrator for the Jesus Film Project, raising support to become a missionary to do church planting in Japan, and recently have been world building for a fantasy realm to use in a pen and paper RPG, Sci-Fi and Fantasy is basically the only fiction genre I read, and I’m starting to get sucked into synth-pop.
Also, my brother Jon, who went to Masters same time as us, has been my world-building teammate, and he’s starting to get into fiction writing, and tossing around the idea of using the fantasy world we’re building as the basis for a novell(a), so if you’re still looking for collaborators he might be interested.
Cool, David!
I’ll have a beta version of my novel’s outline done in 2-4 weeks and will be pitching it to various people for feedback. If he’s interested, have him email me (you can find my email address on facebook) and I’ll pitch it to him and see what his level of interest is.
Oh, to clarify, Jon lives in southern California, near me. Daniel is my brother that lives in Lynden.