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Habakkuk 2:14, ‘…the earth shall be full of the knowledge of the glory of YHWH as the waters cover the sea’.
Habakkuk does not say that the earth ‘may’ be, or ‘could’ be filled with the knowledge of the glory of YHWH, he—and so the Spirit of God through him—says that it *shall be.* Whatever tumults and hardships, whatever horrors and upheavals, whatever overthrowals or traumas, this is where all of created reality is headed: To be drowned into life by and saturated down to the super-string fibers with the knowledge of the glory (or beauty, or identity, or Name) of the One True God.
What does that mean? Well, consider that final phrase, ‘as the waters cover the sea’—how do the waters cover the sea? Can you separate the water that covers the sea from the sea itself? If you scoop up a bucket of the sea, is that bucket filled with the sea, or with the waters that cover it? You cannot distinguish the two.
In a similar way, Habakkuk anticipates a day when the revealed and recognized beauty of YHWH God will so pervade every dimension of existence, that questions like: ‘Is this a tree, or is this the beauty of God?’ Or, ‘is this a mountain or the glory of God’s Name?’ Or ‘Is this a feast or is this the excellence of God’s character?’—will be as meaningless as ‘Is this the sea or the waters that cover it?’ The answer is Yes!
Even more than a change in creation itself (which is already declaring the glory of God), this vision implies that the humans inhabiting the new creation will have wholly redeemed, ‘spiritual’ senses, such that sight and sound and taste and touch and smell, and all the rest, will immediately and without mediation communicate the beauty of God to the sensing subject.
And the glory / beauty / excellence of God that will saturate all of creation is nothing other than the Name of God as it is known in the crucified and risen Jesus Christ (2 Cor.4:6). Take heart, Christian, the day is coming when the harmonized symphony of all creation will sing a new song (which is the oldest) to every sense of our risen bodies: The surpassing beauty of YHWH as He is revealed in the crucified Son who is Risen.
