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EXPLOSION OF KNOWLEDGE
We think Bible prophecy should be understood literally and so each week we present information that corroborates what we read in God’s Word.
Students of Bible prophecy have long predicted that in the End Times there would be what is called the “explosion of knowledge.”
The observation is based on the words of Daniel 12:4,
Daniel 12:4
“But you, Daniel, shut up the words, and seal the book until the time of the end; many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall increase.”
“Many shall run to and fro” has been related to modern forms of transportation. It’s obvious, isn’t it, that it’s just been this last century out of the seven thousand years of recorded human history that swift and prevalent transportation has been possible?
Chuck Missler said,
“In the days of David and Abraham we communicated with handwritten messages, we travelled at the speed of horseback, and we clothed ourselves with an agrarian economy. You can go all the way through history to George Washington who communicated with handwritten messages, travelled at the speed of horseback, and clothed himself with an agrarian economy.
Here in just a short time we now communicate at the speed of light, we travel at the speed of sound, and we create the very atoms and molecules that we desire for synthetic fabrics.”
We want to concentrate on the phrase in Daniel 12:4, “knowledge shall increase.”
The Hebrew word for “increase” (rabah) implies not only an addition of knowledge but also a multiplication – or a knowledge that is increasing exponentially.
The exponential explosion of knowledge is now. On December 27th (2009), TechNewsWorld.co posted an article titled, What Technology Will Bring to the Next Decade. ((http://www.technewsworld.com/story/What-Technology-Will-Bring-to-the-Next-Decade-68917.html)) While it mostly tries to predict it contains some amazing info on how far we’ve come in just a short time.
Excerpts:
Ten years ago, we would have been blown away by a cellphone with far more computing power and memory than the average PC had in 1999, along with a built-in camera and programs to manage every aspect of our lives. Ten years from now, the iPhone and its ilk will be antiques.
Recall the personal computer, circa 2000. It likely had a “clock speed” – a measure of how fast it could do things – just one-sixth of many computers today.
Apple’s 1999 iMac came with 64 megabytes of RAM – [the] memory that helps computers switch among programs. Today’s iMac today has 60 times as much. The vintage iMac had a 10-gigabyte hard drive for storing digital photos and other files. Now iPods have more space than that, and iMac drives start at 500 gigabytes.
Remember dial-up? In 2000, fewer than 10 percent of U.S. households had broadband Internet… In 2008, 61 percent of homes had it.
As computers and Internet connections got faster, we enjoyed them more. In October 2002, the average American spent about 52 hours a month on a home computer… This October, the figure was nearly 68 hours a month.
We filled ever-more-spacious hard drives with music and photographs, as households with digital cameras jumped from 10 percent in 2000 to 68 percent last year, and those with an MP3 player climbed from less than 2 percent in 2000 to 41 percent in 2008…
We increased the ways we could stay connected: More of us got cellphones, camera phones, smartphones and the iPhone. We bought more laptops and came to expect Internet connections almost everywhere.
Personal home pages were replaced by blogs that could be set up in seconds, which gave anyone with a computer and Web access the potential to reach a bigger audience than many newspapers. First-generation social networks, little more than online address books, gave way to sites such as Facebook and Twitter, where we add our words, photos, links and video posts to a collective stream of consciousness.
The following comparisons were suggested by someone who believes the earth is very old and that humans have been here millions of years. Nevertheless his stats on information doubling are fascinating.
• It took 4 million years of human existence to arrive at the “information density” of Rome in the year 1AD.
• 1,500 years later, in the time of Leonardo DaVinci and the Renaissance, that information density had doubled.
• The next doubling took 250 years, as marked by the beginning of the Industrial Revolution and the birth of democracy.
• In [only] six years from 1967 to 1973, another doubling occurred.
• By 1998, information doubling was estimated to occur every 18 months.
A 2006 analysis put it this way:
The fastest increasing quantity on this planet is the amount of information we are generating. It is (and has been) expanding faster than anything else we create or can measure… Information is accumulating faster than any material or artifact in this world, faster than any by-product of our activities.
… two economists at UC Berkeley calculated our total global information production for one year… [Hal] Varian and [Peter] Lyman estimate that the total production of new information in 2000 reached 1.5 exabytes. They explain that is about 37,000 times as much information as is in the entire holdings Library of Congress. For one year! Three years later the annual total yielded 3.5 exabytes. That yields a 66% rate of growth in information per year. (http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2006/02/the_speed_of_in.php)
The exponential explosion of knowledge is now. This certainly qualifies as the time Daniel foresaw as the time of the end. It coincides with the many other End Times predictions of the Bible, e.g., the rebirth of the nation of Israel and the technical possibility of a global, cashless economy.
Jesus once said,
Matthew 16:3
…and in the morning [you say], ‘It will be foul weather today, for the sky is red and threatening…’ You know how to discern the face of the sky, but you cannot discern the signs of the times.
Well, we do discern the signs of the times! They are all around us.
They serve to remind us of something that needs no sign. Jesus promised He would return for us to resurrect the dead in Christ and to rapture living believers. It is something that could happen at any moment.
Get ready, stay ready, keep looking up.
Ready or not, Jesus is coming!
