HOMILETICS
SECT. XLVIII.—THE INCREASE OF KNOWLEDGE AS A SIGN OF THE TIME. (Chap. Daniel 12:4.)
Daniel had already received a very full and minute account of what was to befall his people in the latter days. The information communicated, however, was to be “shut up and sealed,” [360] as a precious treasure that was to be carefully guarded, and as something that would be more known and appreciated hereafter than at present. The same order we find to have been given in relation to the vision of the Ram and the He-goat, the reason given being that the vision was to be “for many days,” or only to receive its fulfilment after a length of time. So here; the words were to be shut up and the book sealed “even to the time of the end,” when they should be about to receive their entire accomplishment. The meaning conveyed apparently that as the end approached the prophecy would be both more studied and better understood. There would seem to be a time when, for wise reasons, the right understanding of prophetic scripture is withheld, and when that part of the word is not even studied equally with the rest. The prophet was commanded to “bind up the testimony and seal the law among the disciples” (Isaiah 8:16); so that when the book was handed to one to read, the reply should be, “I cannot, for it is sealed” (Isaiah 29:11). John in Patmos, on the other hand, was commanded not to seal the sayings of the Apocalypse, because the time for their fulfilment was at hand (Revelation 22:10). For the same reason a blessing is promised to those who read and those who hear the words of that prophecy, and who keep what is written in it (Revelation 1:3). A sealed book not able to be read till the seals are broken (Revelation 5:1, &c.) The prophecies of the Old Testament confirmed or made “more sure” by the events of the New; so that we are encouraged to take heed to that word of prophecy, as to a light shining in a dark place till the day of clearer knowledge dawn (2 Peter 1:19).
[360] “Shut up the words, and seal the book.” According to some, the prophecy was to be only enigmatically delivered to a few, because scarcely one in a hundred would be worthy to receive it, or give it any attention. Calvin thinks the meaning of the order to be that, although it should be universally despised and ridiculed, it was yet to be shut up like a precious treasure; and not to be treated as valueless, because so few should embrace the teaching it contained; the direction being given for the consolation and encouragement of the prophet himself, lest he grew weary and despondent, because it failed to command the applause of all the world. Jerome says the prophet was to fold up the prophecy in dark speech, and sign it that many might read and seek the truth of the history. Bullinger thinks the command meant that nothing was to be added to the prophecy, it being perfect and absolute; Willet, that he should commit it to writing, and set it forth in obscure terms and words, to take care of it as a treasure, and not impart it generally to all; and that many years should elapse before its fulfilment. According to Brightman, the angel would have Daniel to write the prophecy in precisely the same words and after the same manner in which he had received it, and to add nothing of his own by way of exposition. Dr. Cox thinks the command implies that those last events will only be unravelled, in their full glory and meaning, as the time for their accomplishment approaches, when great inquiry should be excited and increasing knowledge acquired, as they should break one after another in rapid and splendid succession upon the view of the Church. Hengstenberg thinks the command only relates to a symbolical action, to be understood of something internal; and after the removal of the mere drapery, the imperatives are to be resolved into futures, thus,—“These prophecies will be closed and sealed till the time of the end.” Keil understands the words in the sense of guarding, while he supposes that the command refers to the whole of the visions received by Daniel, all of which he understands the prophet to have committed to writing. The prophet was to guard the entire book containing them from disfigurement, “till the time of the end,” because its contents stretched out to that period
The words in the second clause of the verse, from the place which they occupy, have been thought by many to refer to what should take place toward the time of the end, viz., that there should be a greater amount of study given, as to other subjects of knowledge, so more especially to the written word, and to the word of prophecy in particular, and that accordingly there should be a much better understanding of its contents; [361] as well as that, from the increased facilities for locomotion, its dissemination should be greatly increased. And it is a remarkable fact, and one that cannot fail to be regarded as a striking feature of the time in which we live, and a sign of an approaching state of things different from what has hitherto existed, that these words of the prophet have received so literal and extensive a fulfilment during the last eighty or a hundred years far beyond any former period. That many have “run to and fro,” and that a spirit of inquiry and awakened interest in Daniel’s prophecies, and in the teachings of the prophetic scriptures in general, has appeared in our own time, none acquainted with the religious literature and history of the present century can hesitate to acknowledge. In England especially, it is well known that from the time of the first French Revolution the attention has been in a remarkable degree drawn to the subject of prophecy; many thoughtful and enlightened Christians having been led to view, in that event and those which followed, what might probably prove “the beginning of the end.” From that time to the present numerous books have continued to be written on the subject, a thing which had previously been exceedingly rare. The number of those who have been led to give deep and earnest attention to the prophetic word, and who have consequently become comparatively well acquainted with its contents and teaching, has been largely increased. Evidences of the same increased interest, and means tending to the same result, have been seen in the courses of lectures delivered, and the periodicals started, in connection with the same subject. In Germany, somewhat earlier, the attention of the Church was awakened in a similar manner by the writings of Spener, and still more by those of Bengel. This increased attention to and knowledge of prophetic scripture, while it is itself a remarkable fulfilment of such scripture, is at the same time a sign of the approaching “end,” when all prophecy shall have its accomplishment. “Apocalyptic prophecy,” says Auberlen, “is approaching its fulfilment. For this reason the Lord adds to the light of faith also the light of hope. He leads us ever deeper into the understanding of the Apocalypse, and will give us apostolic knowledge for apostolic times and struggles. It is the undisputable merit of Bengel that he prepared the way for such a knowledge.”
[361] “Many shall run to and fro.” יְשֹׁטְטוּ (yeshotetoo), “shall go up and down,” especially with the view of searching and investigating. So Job 1:7; Job 2:2. Keil remarks that שׁוּט (shoot) signifies neither to “go astray,” as J. D. Michaelis supposed, nor to “wander about” as in consciousness of misery, as Hävernick thought; but only to go to and fro, to pass through a land, in order to seek out or search, to go about spying. It is used of the eyes of God in Zechariah 4:10, as well as of Satan in Job 1:7, &c. Here the idea is that of searching a book, not merely reading it industriously, as Hitzig or Ewald renders the word; but, as Gesenius says, thoroughly searching in it. Keil, however, would not confine the passage to the time of the end; and agrees with Kliefoth in his interpretation of it, that Daniel must place in security the prophecies he has received until the time of the end, so that through all times many men may be able to read them and gain understanding from them. Calvin says: “Many shall investigate; this prophecy shall not always be buried in obscurity; the Lord will at length cause many to embrace it to their own salvation.” He adds that this really came to pass: “Before Christ’s coming, this doctrine was not esteemed according to its value; whereas now this divine assistance affords us strength and enables us to overcome all the attacks of the world and the devil.” Vatablus understands the prediction to mean that many should go to and fro to obtain knowledge.
In relation to the diffusion of divine truth in general, and of the knowledge of Jesus Christ, its central subject, the prediction in the text receives a fulfilment in the present beyond any previous period of the world. Probably not even in apostolic times was it true to an equal extent. In reference to England, preeminently the country of Bibles and missions, never were earnest living witness-bearers for Christ, whether as ministers, city missionaries, evangelists, lay-preachers, and Sabbath-school teachers, even in proportion to the increased population, nearly so numerous as at present; and never was the Gospel, in its purity, so widely promulgated in heathen lands. The empire of China, which with its four hundred millions has now opened her doors to the Gospel; India, which, with its two hundred and fifty millions, is now all our own and everywhere accessible to the truth; Japan, Africa, and the islands of the South Seas are now visited by the heralds of salvation as never before. [362] In India, the Zenanas, or apartments of the women, hitherto secluded from Christian intercourse, are now open to the female teacher and missionary of the cross. “The year (1881) upon which we have entered,” says an American publication, “begins with the whole world open to the Gospel; with an array of nearly 3000 foreign missionaries encircling the globe; with one hundred and fifty millions of copies of the Holy Bible proclaiming their message in two hundred and fifty tongues, and with a great multitude of nearly two million converts from heathenism as the firstfruits of the Gentiles. More than one thousand seraglios in India are open to the missionaries of our Women’s Boards; imperial palaces in China are open to our medical missionaries, and imperial patronage is fostering our missionary hospitals; pagan religions are becoming effete, and even Mahommedanism is at last beginning to yield to the Gospel.” “Since the commencement of the nineteenth century,” says Dr. Christlieb, “Protestant missions have been spreading among people of every race, and in every possible state of civilisation; they have been growing ever vaster in extent and in plan of operation, while they are always becoming more difficult to estimate in their effects and fruits, in their leavening influence on the faith and life of the heathen, as well as in their reflex action on the Church at home.” “We live in an age of missions,” he says again, “such—the mere outward extent of them shows it—as the Church has never seen.… The cross of Christ is being lifted up no longer in a few non-Christian lands, but in every one, among all races of men, the comparatively civilised as the most degraded; in colonies, as in independent heathen lands; in hundreds of languages and dialects. Those provinces of the Church, too, once lost to her, and crushed beneath the bloody heel of Islam, by the light of the Gospel are now being awakened to newness of life.”
[362] “Knowledge shall be increased.” In the year 1797, says E. Irving, “when the two witnesses were to recover life (Revelation 11), the London Missionary Society was called into being, or, at least, began its first active operations amongst the heathens; for in that year missionaries were landed in the island of Otaheite, which with all that group hath now been yielded to the preaching of the Word. And since that time, the society has laboured with its chief diligence and success among the islands of the Pacific Ocean, the tribes of Southern Africa, the expatriated and enslaved negroes, and the tribes of Northern Asia. The same year the prophecy began to be fulfilled in another way, by the Baptist missionaries in India addressing themselves to the first new translation of the Scriptures which had been undertaken since the Reformation. From that time till this (1826), the spirit of translating the Scriptures into all languages hath never slumbered nor slept, but been aroused in the Church to an extent beyond all former example; insomuch that within the last thirty years more versions of the Scriptures have been made than existed in all languages before.… And when they began to multiply beyond the means of the various societies to print and circulate them, the Lord raised up that most noble instrument, the Bible Society, which hath taken from the hands of the translators their works as fast as they were finished, and brought them into widest circulation.”
The increased diffusion of Scripture as well as other knowledge by the printed pages is as remarkable as that by the living teacher. Only during the past year the Religious Tract Society alone has issued no less than eighty-one millions of separate publications, no fewer than sixty millions of these being in our mother tongue and circulated in our own country or in the colonies; while above two thousand millions of books, tracts, and periodicals, all containing the truth as it is in Jesus, have been circulated since the formation of the society. At present the British and Foreign Bible Society alone produces at the rate of two copies of the Scriptures every minute throughout the twenty-four hours of the day, working every day in the week; and these copies are transmitted over the whole habitable globe in no less than a hundred and seventy languages. “At the beginning of the present century,” says Dr. Christlieb, “the Scriptures existed in some fifty translations, and were circulated in certainly not more than five millions of copies. Since 1804, i.e., since the formation of the British and Foreign Bible Society, new translations of the Bible, or of its more important parts, have been accomplished in at least two hundred and twenty-six languages and dialects. There are translations of all the Sacred Scriptures into fifty-five, of the New Testament into eighty-four, of particular parts into eighty-seven languages; and now the circulation of the Scriptures, in whole or in part, has amounted to a hundred and forty-eight millions of copies. These translations have been made chiefly by missionaries; and within seventy years over sixty languages have been made to possess a literary history.” In this way the visions of Daniel have been read and searched into as they had never been before.
If we apply the text to the increase of knowledge in general, the prediction is equally verified in the days in which we live. The present is emphatically the age of travel, of exploration, of investigation, and discovery. In whichever of the two senses we take the word, “many run to and fro,” and as the result, “knowledge is increased.” The cheap and rapid mode of printing by steam is itself a means of the fulfilment of the prophecy. By the discovery and use of steam as a motive power, the age in which we live is an age of books and cheap literature. The diffusion of knowledge, by means of books, journals, schools, and lectures, is one of the characteristics of the present age. The facilities for cheap and rapid travelling and transit tend in the same direction. The productions of authors, as well as the living teachers, are thus continually speeding over land and ocean as at no former period of the world. By these means, as well as the advance of education, mental activity has reached a greater height than ever before. Probably never was the desire to acquire and to communicate knowledge so great as it is at present. Not only do we live in the days of gas and steam, two discoveries of the present century, but of an agent of still greater power, and one likely to produce still greater effects than it has done already in the telegraph,—namely, electricity. At the International Electrical Exhibition recently opened in Paris, visitors are conveyed from the Place de la Concorde to the exhibition building by a tramcar worked by electricity; and when there, they find that the objects exhibited are divided into no less than sixteen classes, and that no less than twenty-eight rooms are each lighted by a different electric system, and contain specimens of electric railways, electric boats, and electric balloons, with vast masses of machinery driven by electricity. [363]
[363] In relation to the increase of mere natural knowledge as predicted in the text, the same writer, more than half a century ago, observed: “Of all characteristics of the present times, the increase of our natural knowledge is perhaps the most remarkable, except the dissemination of it. The zeal with which the earth hath been run over, for facts and specimens, in all departments of science, the numbers of travellers and voyagers, and the apparatus for discovery and observation with which they go attended; the books which teem from the press in that kind, and the exactness with which they are written, are only surpassed by the inventions of printing and copying by which they are circulated through the earth with the speed of life and death: and cultivation of the intellect in all that respects outward visible things, is the great end of education; and hath been carried to a wonderful perfection; insomuch that these intellectual tastes have rooted out many of the sensual excesses and indulgences of our fathers. And education is the rallying word of all well-disposed men. For the perfecting of which, the inventions which have taken place of late are altogether marvellous; so that from the swaddling-band of childhood up to the fathers of families, you shall find the people in some school or other, either infantine, academical, or mechanical.” If true in 1826, how much more so now in 1881!
The prediction in the text may well stimulate the friends of Jesus and of their fellowmen to greater zeal. Much has been done already in diffusing the knowledge of the truth, but still more remains to be done. Millions are still perishing in all parts of the world for lack of knowledge. Only five thousand missionaries are sent to a thousand millions of heathens, or one to two hundred thousand souls. The cry of Macedonia reaches us still from a thousand places, “Come over and help us.” The appeal for more men, and more means for their support, is still addressed to the churches. Increased openings, increased facilities, and increased prosperity, call for greatly increased operations in the field of missions. “Friends of Jesus,” says the author of the Telegraphic Sign, “make haste to the rescue of those who are perishing in ignorance, because they are ‘out of the way.’ Let there be promptness and rapidity in your movements. Everything around you is on the wing, as if the world were running a race, and had scarcely time to take breath, even for a moment. Let there be speed in your operations. In commerce, literature, and the arts, all is expedition. Things are done quickly, fast, in haste. The work of years is accomplished in as many days. The instinctive, predominant, prevailing propensity, as if from some strange presentiment, is, to save time. For what purpose is never seriously inquired. But that which is done is given out to be done without delay. It is getting late. Every moment is precious. The clock is just on the stroke. Hurry, Hurry. Let not a second be lost. Yet what is all this for? What is all this busy, bustling hurry intended to subserve? Merely to relieve, and lighten, and help on the brief hours of a temporary existence. It is vanity and vexation of spirit after all; a scrambling for gain, a labouring only for the meat that perisheth. And yet for this all the world is taxed. Land and water are laid under revenue in the shortest possible time. Steam engines, steam presses, steam ploughs, steam ships, are all charged to do their utmost. The sails of commerce whiten every shore. Screws and paddles propel the mighty merchandise of the seas. Railway carriages ‘run.’ The telegraph outstrips the winds. Power to overcome resistance, derived from natural forces and not from brute strength, is summoned and put on the stretch to do the bidding of man at a word. Do we not rejoice at the wonderful facilities and improvements of our time? We do. We bless God for endowing His creatures with the marvellous faculty of invention, by which various and even opposite properties are combined and utilities created, that would have lain in the crypts and caverns of unexplored nature, had they not been brought out and dominated by the laws of mechanical science, and rendered so beautifully and amazingly subservient to the wants and interests of society. We could not, we would not, go back to the Middle Ages of slow travelling, slow production, slow printing, slow progress in every department of service. We are more than satisfied with our present vantage ground, while we are almost dizzy with our lofty, elevated, far-stretching advance. But here is our condemnation and our shame. Our religious improvement has not gone on in the same ratio with our commercial and political progression. The march of evangelism has not kept pace with the march of intellect. Education is putting out the leaden eyes of ignorance, pouring the light of knowledge on the visual ray, and kindling the spark of intelligence in the minds of the untutored masses, while ‘darkness still covers the earth, and gross darkness the people.’ All else with impetuous stride has nearly reached the goal, while the chariot of the everlasting Gospel, bearing the message of salvation to dying millions, still drags its slow length along; and though above eighteen hundred years on the highway of the world’s amelioration, has not yet traversed half the globe, seeing two-thirds of its population at least are to this day unacquainted with the ‘faithful saying, and worthy of all acceptation,’ that Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners, even the chief. On whom does the charge of negligence in this matter rest? All religious parties are more or less implicated. We have none of us put our shoulder to the wheel as we ought to have done. We have not been zealous for the Lord of Hosts. We have set our affections too much on earthly things. We have hoarded our substance instead of giving it to Christ. We have hid our Lord’s money, instead of employing it for the spread of the Gospel. The streams of wealth that have flowed to us from the bountiful hand of God, we have diverted from their legitimate channels, for their transmission into dry and thirsty lands where no spiritual water is. We have selfishly turned them into our own reservoirs, and made them administer to our whims, and fancies, and pride.”
May the time past suffice to have been guilty of our brother’s blood; and may we now at length, in the self-denying spirit of the Master, rise and do our utmost to spread the Gospel of the kingdom among all nations, that the promised end may come!