By C. Eldon McNabb

“Thou, O 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” (Daniel 12:4).

In Daniel 12:1-4, God told Daniel about a coming tribulation, and the resurrection of the dead which would follow it.  He then told Daniel to shut up the words of the prophecy, and seal the book, and that it would be opened at “the time of the end.”  Then he followed that with a note about something significant which would occur at the end, saying, “Many shall run to and fro, and knowledge shall be increased.”

This passage simply tells us that the time of preaching only “the simplicity that is in Christ” (2 Cor. 11:3 and Proverbs 1:22) must come to an end, when the time of the end comes.  At that time, God is going to open the mysteries concerning “Christ and the Church,” as well as the revelation of the timing of that series of events which will immediately precede the glorious appearing of our Lord.

During “the time of the end,” which Jesus said, “is the time of harvest,” we must learn the answers to such questions as the one posed by one saint to another, saying, “How long shall be the vision concerning the daily sacrifice, and the transgression of desolation, to give both the sanctuary and the host to be trodden under foot?”  To which the other saint answered, “Two thousand and three hundred days.”

Later, a similar question was asked, saying, “How long shall it be to the end of these wonders?”  Whereupon “The man clothed with linen swore by Him that lives forever that it shall be for a time, times and a half; and when He shall have accomplished to scatter the power of His holy people, all these things shall be finished.”

Daniel did not understand, so he asked, “What shall be the end of these things?  And God said, Go thy way, Daniel: for the words are closed up and sealed till the time of the end.  Many shall be purified, and made white, and tried, but the wicked shall do wickedly: and none of the wicked shall understand; but the wise shall understand.  And from the time that the daily sacrifice shall be taken away, and the abomination that makes desolate set up, there shall be a thousand two hundred and ninety days.  Blessed is he that waits, and comes to the thousand three hundred and five and thirty days.  But go thou thy way till the end be: for you shall rest, and stand in thy lot at the end of the days.”

These assorted times and things seem almost impossible to make any sense out of, even under close and exhaustive study, which only serves to show that we can understand it only by revelation from the Most High.  Accordingly God has indeed given us the knowledge to understand the times, and events which are mentioned here, and has appointed me to declare them to you.

The Daily Sacrifice:  In Daniel 8:14, we are given the pivotal time of 2,300 days; during which a large group of Christians will be “purified, and made white, and tried.”  It is they who shall know the times, to know what we Christians need to do to prepare for the coming of our Lord, and the ensuing marriage.  As in the days of Noah, the wicked among God’s people shall continue in their wickedness – business as usual, unable to discern the signs of the times – and they will suffer the wrath of God, in the day of His wrath.  During those 2,300 days (this is not a metaphor), the abomination that makes desolate shall be set up by our Christian leadership, and God shall cause the daily sacrifice to be taken away.

The leaders of modern Christianity are, even now, working at setting up a system of worship which they intend to force upon all who pro­fess Christianity.  It will be so abom­inable that we Gentile Christians will lose the wonderful access to God which we have had since the veil of the Temple was torn in two at the death of Jesus.  The New Testament “daily sacrifice” shall be taken from them, and a new system which God has ordained shall be set up.

In essence, God is going to break the covenant of the New Testament.  Oh, there will be a time of transition, the same as there was a forty-year transition from the Law of Moses to the total changeover to grace.  It was about forty years from the beginning of Jesus’ ministry until the temple was destroyed and the transition was complete.  This time, there shall be only about a four year transition from Grace to The Kingdom of God. 

Just about three and a half years after the ascension of Jesus, in the midst of the seventieth week of Daniel 9:24-27, the wickedness of the Jewish priesthood provoked God to “take away the daily sacrifice, and give that function to the “kingdom of priests,” which was the Church.  At the command of God, they were “daily in the temple, and in every house, they ceased not to preach Jesus Christ” (Acts chapters 5 and 6).

In Revelation 11:2, John prophesied of the forty-two-month Palestinian intifada against Jerusalem, from September 28, 2000 to March 2004, which was the sign to mark the beginning of “the days.”

The 1,290 days of Daniel are the final days of the 2,300 days.  If your make a small chart on a seven year calendar, beginning in the end of march 2004, and start the 2,300 days at the beginning of it, then count back 1,290 days from the end of the 2,300 days, you will find the approximate date before which the Daily Sacrifice shall be taken away this time.  If you will then take the 1,335 days, and begin them at the same time that the 1,290 days begin, you will come to a point 45 days beyond the end of the 2,300 and 1,290 days.  And you will still be about 45 days before the “half a time.”  It is the end of the 1,335 days which marks the appearing of our Savior: our Blessed King.

The Move West:  In the middle of the sixth millennium from the creation of Adam, a movement of people migrating to the western hemisphere began, and the eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries saw the annual traffic increase into the thousands.

At some time during those two centuries, or earlier, this prophecy in Daniel 12:4, together with Joel 2:28,29 and Acts 2:17,18, began to be fulfilled as God began to pour out of His Spirit upon all flesh, and the industrial revolution burst upon the world.

At the beginning of the 1900s, it was still possible for a person to learn all of the knowledge which man had acquired up to that time.  But since the beginning of the twentieth century, man has increased in knowledge far beyond any man’s ability to retain it all; perhaps even to study all of it.

Not Without God:  God said, “It shall come to pass in the last days, that I will pour out my Spirit upon all flesh; and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your old men shall dream dreams, and your young men shall see visions:  And also upon My servants and upon My handmaids in those days will I pour out my spirit; and they shall prophesy.”

One of the greatest examples of the validity of this prophecy is the wonderful wit of the French novelist Jules Verne.  In 1870, he prophesied by writing of men cruising the depths of the sea for long periods of time; and in 1865 and 1873, he wrote of going to the moon, and around the moon.  In his description of man’s first trip to the surface of the moon, he prophesied of the critical statistics of man’s first landing on the moon.  He envisioned very nearly the exact size of the craft, the number of people who went, the amount of time required for the trip, and the place where the real excursion eventually went in 1969.  Only God could have guided his pen.

Although the increase of man’s knowledge has been an amazing phenomenon, God never intended for it to be solely a secular thing.  So, in 1896, in North Carolina, God began to pour out His Holy Spirit upon His faithful servants, and handmaids, and they too began to prophesy.  Almost immediately, God began to move upon a man of His choosing, to reveal unto him the knowledge of the “mystery of Christ and the Church.”  His name was A.J. Tomlinson.

Up until that time, the scope of the knowledge possessed by the Lord’s servants and handmaids had consisted, almost altogether, of the experience of being “Born Again,” and of the second work of grace: “Sanctification of the Spirit” (Romans 5:1,2; 1 Peter 1:2).  However, with the outpouring of the Holy Ghost in 1896, and the rise of The Church of God in 1903, the way was made for the achieving of Paul’s declaration in Ephesians 3:8-12.  He said that God had hidden “the Fellowship of the Mystery” from the beginning of the world, “to the intent that now (unto His holy Apostles and Prophets: the rulers of His people) might be known by the Church the manifold wisdom of God.”

I sort of stand in awe of the preaching I hear from the ministry today.  We are a mere few years from the end of the Grace Age, and we are still being told that we can not know anything about when it is all going to be over; in spite of the many signs which we have been given in more than a century of automobiles, airplanes, motorcycles, telephones, radios, televisions, and computers.  We have had more than 110 years of this continual parade of the signs of the soon coming of Jesus.

So the ten virgins sleep on!  How can we believe that the world can come to such knowledge as they have, and God’s people, who have the source of “all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col. 2:3), must function in ignorance?  I am convinced that the world was given the knowledge of the “things,” but that God’s ministers have been given the understanding of what it is all about.  But as Christians, having spiritual eyes to see with, and spiritual ears to hear with, they still neither see nor hear.  Meanwhile, God is raising up a group of ministers which, as Peter, will know when to declare the progressive fulfillment of the prophecies of our time.

On September 21, 2006, after eleven days in space, building their nest among the stars, at about 200 miles from Earth, traveling in orbit at about 27,000 miles per hour, the six astronauts on the space shuttle Atlantis announced their plan to land at Kennedy Space center in Florida at 6:21 a.m., and headed home.  I watched the final minutes of their approach to a nearly flawless landing, and as they settled onto the runway, I glanced at the clock on the screen which read 6:21.

Those astronauts, together with the support of their ground crew, had made an amazing trip, done an amazing job, and set a time for landing, and touched down at exactly the time which they had prophesied.  And they were able to do it, because two or three centuries ago, God began to pour out the Holy Ghost upon mankind.

Almost 2,000 years ago, The Son of Man went on a journey into outer space, and appointed a day in which He will return, and by the prophecy in the allegory of “Barley Harvest,” He has given about a forty-nine year notice.  The harvest began in 1962, with the beginning of the Ecumenical movement. Please do not tell me that you do not believe I can know that.  God has given me the Baptism with the same Holy Ghost which the early apostles had, and the Spirit of Wisdom and of Revelation in the Knowledge of Him, and the Spirit of Prophecy, and the gift of Apostle, and has guided me through sixty-one years of ardently searching the Word of God, and I have also come to visions and revelations of the Lord.

Even under the Law, the children of Issachar were men that had understanding of the times, to know what God’s people ought to do.  And so it is with The People of Truth, and we have the great advantage of the marvelous working of the Holy Spirit within us.

Jesus chided the Jewish leaders of His day for being able to interpret the signs of the weather patterns, but not able to know the signs of the time of their visitation.  Therefore, He set for them a sign; the sign of the prophet Jonah: His resurrection after three days and three nights in the grave.  How much more shall God chide this generation, since they have had far greater signs than were seen by God’s people in Jesus’ day.

In Romans chapter 2, Paul said that God would deal the same way with the Gentiles in our day as He did with the Jews in the first century A.D.  God gave them the sign of Jonah, and He will give us the sign of Noah: a preacher of righteousness.  A group of God’s ministers are again “ten times wiser than” than the wise men of the world, as well as the leaders of apostate Christianity.

If you want to be alive and remain unto the coming of Jesus, you would do well to find someone to guide you into all truth, by the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.