[Bible & IT Part 1] God Predicted the Internet — And He's Not Surprised You Work in Tech

Daniel 12:4 & The Information Explosion

There's a moment in almost every developer's career when you stop and think: How did we get here so fast?

Maybe it hit you the first time you asked an AI to debug your code and it actually worked. Maybe it was when you realized your phone has more computing power than NASA had when they landed on the moon. Maybe it was just last Tuesday — when you joined a Zoom call with teammates on four continents, screenshared a live database, fixed a bug in real time, and then ordered lunch without leaving your chair.

We are living inside something unprecedented. And somehow, a Hebrew prophet locked in Babylon 2,600 years ago described it in eleven words.

"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."

— Daniel 12:4 (ESV)

Seal it. It's not for your time. It's for later.

You are later.

"Many shall run to and fro"

We don't have a single word for what this describes, so we invented several: globalization, remote work, digital nomadism, hypermobility. The average knowledge worker today touches more cities, time zones, and cultures in a single career than most ancient people encountered in a lifetime. A senior engineer in Austin leads a standup at 7am with backend devs in Warsaw, hands off to a QA team in Manila, and merges a PR reviewed by someone working from a beach in Lisbon.

We are a generation that runs to and fro — and we built the infrastructure to do it invisibly, at the speed of light.

"Knowledge shall increase"

This is where it gets almost eerie.

In 1900, human knowledge doubled roughly every century. By the end of World War II, every 25 years. By 1982, every year. IBM's research estimated that by 2020, the sum total of human knowledge was doubling every 12 hours.

Not years. Not months. Every twelve hours.

You go to sleep. You wake up. The world knows twice as much.

Daniel didn't have vocabulary for fiber optic cables or transformer models or the fact that a single hyperscale data center processes more queries in a day than all the scribes of the ancient world wrote in their entire lifetimes. He just knew: there's coming a time when knowledge itself goes exponential. And the angel told him to seal that part of the vision — because the people who needed to understand it hadn't been born yet.

So what does this mean for you — the person reading this on a laptop, probably with seventeen tabs open?

It means your industry is not an accident of history. The explosion of information technology, the compression of global distance, the democratization of knowledge — these aren't random economic phenomena. They fit inside a prophetic framework that was written before your civilization existed.

Which raises a question that's been sitting in my chest for years: If God saw the information age coming — what did He intend for His people to do with it?

Enter Habakkuk.

"For the earth will be filled with the knowledge of the glory of the LORD as the waters cover the sea."

— Habakkuk 2:14 (NIV)

Not trickling in. Not gradually accumulating. Covering. Like water covers the sea — total, pervasive, inescapable.

Now think about what your job actually involves. You build platforms that reach millions. You architect systems that deliver content at scale. You write algorithms that determine what people see, what they read, what they believe matters. You maintain the pipes through which human culture now flows.

The question isn't whether information will travel through those pipes. It will — it does, right now, every second. The question is whether the people who built those pipes, who maintain them, who improve them — whether those people know what this moment is for.

This isn't a guilt trip. It's an invitation.

Daniel was placed in the most powerful empire of his day — in its bureaucratic core, in its knowledge institutions. He didn't abandon Babylon. He served faithfully, maintained his integrity, and became a witness in the exact place God put him.

You're in tech. That's your Babylon. Not because it's evil — but because it's strategic.

The knowledge is already increasing. The question is: whose knowledge? What fills the channels you're building?

Many shall run to and fro. Keep running. Just know where you're running toward.

References:

Crossmap Blog - Faith Tech: https://blogs.crossmap.com/faithtech

Bible Gateway — Daniel 12:4 ESVhttps://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Daniel+12%3A4&version=ESV

IBM Knowledge Doubling research summaryhttps://www.industrytap.com/knowledge-doubling-every-12-hours-on-the-internet-of-things/3875

The Gospel Coalition — Digital Revolution & Churchhttps://www.thegospelcoalition.org/article/digital-revolution-church/