A World Overloaded

For most of history the problem wasn't having enough information. Getting the news, a Bible, a doctor's answer, or a stranger's biography took time, money, or someone willing to talk. That world's gone. The average person now carries a device that can locate a person, translate a language, model a symptom, or surface a decade-old photo in seconds. In January 2024, a finance employee at the London engineering firm Arup joined a video call with his company's CFO and several colleagues. Every face and voice on that call was fake - an AI trained on hours of public conference footage the real executives had no idea was being harvested for this purpose. Convinced he was talking to people he knew, the employee approved fifteen wire transfers totaling roughly $25.6 million before anyone realized the whole meeting had been manufactured. The fraud only needed two things to work: too much of the executives' information sitting freely available online, and a flood of convincingly bad information built out of it. That's the danger in one story - not information itself, but information without limits and without a way to test it.

The Sign the Angel Gave Daniel

"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."

The angel's instruction to Daniel was twofold - seal the prophecy until the appointed time, and mark the end of the age by a restless surge of movement and learning. BibleRef's commentary notes that Daniel's charge to shut up and seal the words points to a season when the meaning of the prophecy would stay obscure until the generation who needed it arrived. Bible Hub's cross-reference notes tie the phrase run to and fro to the same Hebrew word used of eyes searching the whole earth and of people scrambling after understanding - a picture of restless seeking, not settled wisdom. Paul gave Timothy a matching warning about the last days:

"But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come."

"always learning and never able to come to the knowledge of the truth."

Daniel's knowledge shall increase and Paul's never able to come to the knowledge of the truth describe the same era from two angles. More information was never the same promise as more wisdom.

When Privacy Disappears

Privacy isn't a modern invention. It's as old as the fall.

"Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together and made themselves coverings... Then the Lord God called to Adam and said to him, “Where are you?”"

The instinct to cover, to hide, to keep something back was born the moment sin entered the world. God still saw Adam and Eve fully - but that seeing was covered in relationship, not exposure for its own sake. Scripture does promise that hidden sin eventually surfaces:

"...be sure your sin will find you out."

That's a promise about God's justice, not an invitation for strangers, corporations, or algorithms to build a file on every person alive. David could say of the Lord:

"O Lord, You have searched me and known me. You know my sitting down and my rising up... For there is not a word on my tongue, but behold, O Lord, You know it altogether."

That kind of total knowledge is safe only because it comes wrapped in covenant love. What the data economy offers is a counterfeit of it - total knowledge with no love attached. According to the Federal Trade Commission's data-broker research, compiled by TakeBackYourData, the largest brokers hold well over a thousand data points on a single person - name, address, income, health history, and behavior - and sell it to whoever will pay. Privacy Rights Clearinghouse reports that most people have no meaningful way to see what has been collected on them, let alone remove it. And a Fox News report on the scale of the industry heading into 2026 notes that scammers now use purchased broker data to impersonate family members and companies with unsettling accuracy. None of this is knowledge that builds anyone up. Paul warned:

"...Knowledge puffs up, but love builds up."

Do we need to know everything about a celebrity's marriage, a pastor's finances, or a neighbor's search history? Solomon, who had more access to knowledge than almost anyone in his generation, concluded:

"For in much wisdom is much grief, And he who increases knowledge increases sorrow."

When Truth Gets Buried

The second danger isn't knowing too much - it's not being able to tell what's even true anymore. Jesus warned that deception, not just tribulation, would mark the approach of the end:

"For false christs and false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect."

"...whose coming is according to the working of Satan, with all power, signs, and lying wonders, and with all unrighteous deception among those who perish... God will send them strong delusion, that they should believe the lie."

That warning reads differently in an age of synthetic video and cloned voices. The World Economic Forum's Global Risks Report, cited in a 2026 industry survey of the field ranks misinformation and disinformation as the world's top short-term global risk for a second consecutive year. Human beings aren't equipped to catch it on sight - a peer-reviewed meta-analysis of 56 studies put average deepfake-detection accuracy barely above a coin flip, and researchers at MIT found that false stories spread farther, faster, and wider across social media than true ones, in every category measured. Scripture anticipated a world where believing every word is dangerous:

"The simple believes every word, But the prudent considers well his steps."

"Beloved, do not believe every spirit, but test the spirits, whether they are of God; because many false prophets have gone out into the world."

It's the same principle behind my own approach to every prophetic word I cover - this is what I heard, we'll see if it's from God. More information without testing isn't discernment. It's exposure to whatever gets published loudest.

The Knowledge Worth Having

Daniel's sign isn't only a warning. The same explosion of information that scatters lies has also carried the gospel further and faster than any point since the printing press.

"For the earth will be filled With the knowledge of the glory of the Lord, As the waters cover the sea."

"And this gospel of the kingdom will be preached in all the world as a witness to all the nations, and then the end will come."

The YouVersion Bible App's announcement of its one billionth install in November 2025 put a number on that promise - Scripture now sits in over 2,300 languages, on more than a billion devices, in every country on earth. Founder Bobby Gruenewald has described the project as the modern extension of an older breakthrough, saying he "wondered how technology might be able to do something similar for our generation" as Gutenberg's press once did for his (via faith.tools). CBN News reported triple-digit surges in downloads across Ethiopia, Egypt, Turkey, Ghana, and Pakistan in a single week in 2025 - people running to and fro after a different kind of knowledge than the one that troubles us.

"And you shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free."

Knowing What's Worth Knowing

Daniel's sign cuts both ways, and it's worth saying plainly that the same technology behind the Arup fraud has also saved lives - GPS location data that guides first responders to a crash, telemedicine that puts a diagnosis in reach of someone hours from a hospital, alert systems that warn a whole region of a storm or a missing child before it's too late. The tool is not the enemy. What we do with it, and what we let it do to us, is the real question. The same explosion of information that let a stranger buy your address, your income, and your medical history off a data broker's shelf has also put the whole of Scripture into more hands, in more languages, than at any point in church history. Both trends are accelerating together, and neither one is going to reverse. The explosion Daniel was told about isn't primarily a technology problem - it's a discernment problem, and it calls for a response, not just an observation. So test what you're handed before you pass it on. Guard what isn't yours to expose, and refuse to feed on what isn't yours to know about someone else. And in a season flooded with information of every kind, make sure the well you're actually drinking from is the one Jesus described in John 4:14 as never running dry - open the Book as often as you open the feed.

All Scripture quotations are taken from the New King James Version (NKJV).