Most of us come to biblical prophecy one of two ways: either we avoid it entirely because it feels overwhelming, or we dive in and come out the other side convinced we need a bunker and a timeline chart. Neither one seems quite right.
But there’s something in the prophecies themselves – in the very words God gave Daniel – that I’ve come to understand points to a different posture altogether.
Two Prophecies, One Restless World
In Daniel 12:4, an angel tells Daniel:
Shut up the words and seal the book, even to the time of the end. Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.
Hold that image in your mind. People running to and fro. Knowledge increasing. It sounds almost like a description of the internet age – information everywhere, everyone moving fast, searching, scrolling, consuming. Could be…
But then cross over to Amos 8:11-12, and the picture darkens:
Behold, the days come, saith the Lord, that I will send a famine in the land, not a famine for bread, nor a thirst for water, but of hearing the words of the Lord. And they shall wander from sea to sea, and from the north even to the east; they shall run to and fro to seek the word of the Lord, and shall not find it.
Same motion. Same restless running. Completely different point in the timeline of “end times” outcome.
One group is running and finding. The other is running and going empty. The question the prophecies are quietly asking is: which kind of running are you doing?
The Famine Inside the Flood
We live in a time of staggering information. More biblical content is available to more people than at any point in history – commentaries, podcasts, translations, teachings at the touch of a screen. Daniel’s prophecy about increasing knowledge is being fulfilled in ways he could never have imagined.
And yet, something feels thin. People are busier than ever, more connected than ever, and somehow more starved for something real than ever.
That’s the famine Amos described. Not a scarcity of information. A famine of hearing, of actually receiving the word, letting it settle, letting it speak.
You can run to and fro through scripture and still go hungry. The motion itself doesn’t feed you.
The Enemy Knows This
There’s an old observation among spiritual writers that if the enemy can’t make you sin, he’ll make you busy. Busyness isn’t just a modern inconvenience, but a strategy. The rushing spirit, the sense that you must always be moving, consuming, producing, absorbing. It’s one of the most effective tools there is for wearing out the saints.
Daniel 7:25 even names it: the adversary will seek to wear out the people of God.
You don’t have to be doing anything wrong to be spiritually depleted. You just have to stay rushed long enough that you never actually stop and receive.
The Counterintuitive Path
So what separates those who understand the prophecies from those who wander, seeking and not finding?
Daniel 12:10 gives us a clue:
The wicked shall do wickedly, and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.
The wise shall understand. And who are the wise? James 1:5 answers this question:
If any of you lack wisdom, let him ask of God, that giveth to all men liberally, and upbraideth not, and it shall be given him.
Wisdom isn’t accumulated through running faster. It’s received. It’s asked for. It requires actually stopping long enough to ask.
Isaiah 40:31 puts it in the most beautiful terms:
They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; they shall walk, and not faint.
Notice the order. First, waiting. Then, mounting up. The ones who rise aren’t the ones who ran hardest. I have learned, not only from Scripture but in living this, that they’re the ones who waited.
Boredom as a Gateway
There’s something about this that doesn’t get said out loud often enough: sometimes the path into God’s presence goes through a stretch that feels dry. You seek, and for a moment, nothing seems to happen. It feels like boredom.
Don’t leave.
That quiet, slightly uncomfortable place where the noise of everything else is fading but you haven’t heard anything yet? That’s not emptiness. That’s the threshold. God wants to satisfy your mouth with good things (Psalm 103:5), but a mouth that’s already full of everything else has no room.
The renewal of strength that Isaiah promises – the eagle’s wings – is the outcome of being filled. And being filled requires stillness first.
A Blessing Promised
Revelation 1:3 opens with this:
Blessed is he that readeth, and they that hear the words of this prophecy, and keep those things which are written therein, for the time is at hand.
Reading, hearing, keeping. Not panicking. Not charting. Not running to and fro.
The prophecies of Daniel and Revelation aren’t primarily maps of catastrophe. They are a revelation, the word John uses is apokalypsis – an uncovering, of Jesus Christ himself. Of who He is, what He has done, and where all of this is going. They are an invitation to know Him more clearly.
Revelation closes the same way it opened. The final blessing in 22:14:
Blessed are they that do his commandments, that they may have right to the tree of life, and may enter in through the gates into the city.
The people of God will not be the ones who decoded every seal and trumpet. They will be the ones whose hearts were aligned with His — whose minds, as Psalm 40:8 says in its prophecy of Christ and its echo in us, carried His law not as burden but as delight:
I delight to do thy will, O my God; yea, thy law is within my heart.
That’s the Invitation
Prophecy isn’t meant to produce panic. It’s meant to produce people. It’s meant to produce people who stopped running long enough to wait, who waited long enough to receive, who received enough to rise.
The wise will understand, not because they were smarter or more studious but because they asked. Because they stopped. Because they let the Word do what the Word does when you give it room.
You don’t need a bunker.
You need wings.
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