Travel and the last days

Today, seven miles isn’t far to travel. My wife, Karen, and I think nothing about hopping in our car and driving to a beloved restaurant 15 or 20 miles away for a date night.

But that’s because technology has made travel so much easier than before. If we were traveling on foot? We would rarely venture out of our immediate property — especially not for something as temporary as a meal.

I was thinking about this the other day when a friend told me a story he heard from one of his parents. His parents were children when one of them had their life upended by a shocking announcement from the father: He was taking a new job over near the county line. The family would have to pack up and move.

The new destination was incredibly far away. The kids felt like they were moving to the edge of the world, distant from everything they knew and loved. Their entire lives were about to change.

The actual distance the family moved? Seven miles. The county line was just seven miles away.

Things are obviously different today.

I know many grown children who now live far, far away from their families. Some live in another state. Some actually do live on the other side of the world. The recent COVID-19 crisis has disrupted the travel industry and certainly caused some families to rethink their distance from each other. But pre-crisis, it wasn’t that unusual for families to spread out across the country.

Two centuries ago, this would have been stunning to hear. People couldn’t travel casually back then. Families on foot could travel maybe 20 miles a day. On horseback, they could cover up to 40 miles. If they boarded a ship and had favorable winds, they might have been able to travel 100 miles in a single day.

Then train travel arrived in the 19th century and increased mobility. The arrival of cars and buses in the early 20th century expanded travel even further, turning potential daily mileage from the tens into the hundreds. Lengthy road trips became more common, and families grew much more mobile.

By the 1960s, air travel became accessible to the average person. And today, it’s rare to find someone who hasn’t traveled on a jet plane to a faraway destination. For many, a weekend trip to a resort in Mexico or a week in Europe may have been an annual event. Prior to March 2020, international travel was exciting, but still fairly ordinary.

Of course, the COVID-19 pandemic cast a lot of this industry in doubt. The travel industry is returning, slowly, with some precautionary changes. But it will eventually return to what it once was. Even more intriguing, commercial space travel may even become an option over the next few years or decades, thanks to the efforts of ventures like Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Richard Branson’s Virgin Galactic.

What do these facts have to do with the Bible or end-times prophecy?

Daniel 10-12 is a well-known prophetic passage. These chapters describe a vision of the future given to Daniel. These passages predict the emergence of the Antichrist in the last days. Daniel 12 contains an especially intriguing statement about what life will look like prior to the end. The Bible predicts this will be an age of unique human technological capabilities, different from any other generation that precedes it.

“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) 

In this vision, the angel speaks to Daniel and tells him to seal up what he’s been told because no one would understand it until the end times.

But today? A phrase like “many shall run to and fro” seems awfully familiar.

In ancient Israel, people might have traveled several miles a day for trade or worship. Today, many members of our church think nothing of driving 15 miles to a church service, 150 miles to a concert, or flying 1,500 miles for a vacation.

We are living at a moment when travel may be a luxury for many, but it is very much a possibility for anyone. If I wanted, I could travel to the other side of the planet in less than a day.

Ours is a generation defined by our ability to go “to and fro” with incredible ease. Today’s access to travel would astound our ancestors, most of whom were born, raised and buried in the same place. Consider these stats from 2019:

• One in four Americans have traveled internationally.
• In 1960, international tourist arrivals were around 70 million. Last year, they were 1.4 billion.
• Even when traveling domestically within the U.S., 75 percent of people go further than the state bordering their home.
• The average American’s daily commute is 16 miles each way to work.

In other words, Daniel’s prophecy has become a reality in our time.

Could our traveling generation be the period of human history to which Daniel was referring?

The COVID-19 pandemic has impacted travel and will force the industry to continue to evolve. Who knows what it will look like in the years to come? I suspect any immediate declines will eventually give way to further growth. Is it possible travel could evolve even more as technology allows?

If the return of Christ is delayed a few more years, the future may increase our ability to “run to and fro” beyond our collective imagination.

As I explain in detail in my new book, Tipping Point, we are moving at lightning speed toward the return of Christ and the fulfillment of biblical prophecy in our lifetimes.

This article is adapted from The Tipping Point: The End is Here by Jimmy Evans. You can pick up the book here.