Is Space Exploration in Bible Prophecy?

What's happening today is exactly as Daniel predicted it

I had an interesting conversation the other day with a friend. They were talking about the latest SpaceX news, in which a crew of four astronauts undocked from the International Space Station and returned to earth with a splashdown in the Gulf of Mexico. It was the second piloted water landing for a NASA commercial crew after the Space Shuttle program ended, and only the third nighttime splashdown in the history of space exploration.

“Daniel probably had no idea what it meant,” I said. “But this is exactly like he predicted it.”

My friend looked at me like I was crazy. That’s when I reminded him of Daniel chapter 12.

“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

Daniel 10-12 is a well-known prophetic passage describing a vision of the future God gave Daniel. In addition to predicting the arrival of the Antichrist, Daniel gives an intriguing description of what life will look like before the end. The vision is so difficult to understand that the angel who speaks to Daniel tells him to seal up what he’s been told.

Why? Because no one would understand what it means for many to “run to and fro” until the end arrives.

This applies to travel, as I wrote nearly a year ago. But it also applies to space exploration.

Head-spinning leaps in technology

In ancient Israel, people might have traveled a few miles a day for trade or worship. But traveling into space for a mission that spanned 2,688 orbits of the earth—a 68 million mile voyage for members of the crew of the SpaceX Dragon—would have made the ancient Israelites’ heads spin. Talk about running to and fro!

Consider where we are right now in the age of space exploration:

• In February, NASA landed the Mars Perseverance rover on Mars and is piloting the Mars Ingenuity helicopter from it—and relaying the photos back to earth.

• Along with the astronauts, SpaceX is launching a rocket this week with 60 Starlink satellites onboard. To date, SpaceX has launched around 1,500 of these satellites, which bring high-speed internet connectivity to North American customers. Each of these table-sized satellites weighs around 570 pounds.

• The space tourism company Virgin Galactic has been selling tickets to fly into space aboard its private spaceships, including SpaceShipTwo, the “world’s first passenger carrying spaceship” built by a private company. Tickets for the short flights above the atmosphere are $250,000.

• And the Biden administration unveiled a 2022 budget asking Congress to increase its appropriations to NASA by more than $1.5 billion. Experts worry the U.S. is falling behind international competitors like China, India and the United Arab Emirates, who are investing heavily in their programs as part of a new space race.

Knowledge is increasing

It sounds to me like knowledge is increasing. Space used to be a government-controlled environment. Now it’s a playground for private companies like SpaceX and Virgin Galactic.

I know we all thought in the 70s and 80s we would have flying cars and jet packs by the year 2020. That wasn’t the case. But here in 2021, when you take a step back and think about it, the emergence of satellites, smartphones, and the internet is just as impressive. We are able to communicate worldwide in real-time because of these technologies.

We are even able to communicate from our planet to automated, self-driving vehicles on the surface of Mars!

Our ancestors could simply not comprehend today’s technology. I can barely understand it myself.

The advancements in space and rocket technology are compounding exponentially. A satellite used to be a large, bulky piece of equipment. Larger satellites could weigh up to 4,800 pounds. But SpaceX’s Starlink satellites are much smaller than that, and they aren’t even the smallest satellites by far. In early 2019, the Indian Space Research Organisation launched a student-made satellite that weighed only 2.6 pounds and could fit in the palm of your hand.

It’s easy to breeze past all of this information and ignore it because we hear about the moon, Mars, NASA and other kinds of space exploration news all the time. But the gravity of this moment in time is that events are happening at a compounding rate. Knowledge is increasing so fast it’s difficult to keep up with what scientists and private businesses are creating.

It’s not just space, either. As subscribers to these articles know, we are making enormous leaps in artificial intelligence, robotics, genetics and so much more. It’s hard to even imagine what we will experience in the next ten years, or fifty years.

As for me, it’s hard to imagine we will be here 50 years from today at all. It’s simply a matter of time before the events prophesied in scriptures like Daniel 12 fully play out. Stay encouraged and encourage those around you to anticipate the coming of our Lord and Savior with great expectations.