Daniel 8:26

"And the vision of the evenings and the mornings which hath been told is true: but shut thou up the vision; for it belongeth to many days to come. And I, Daniel, fainted, and was sick certain days; then I rose up and did the king's business: and I wondered at the vision, but none understood it."

"Shut thou up the vision ..." (Daniel 8:26). Andrews thought this meant, "Keep it secret";[17] but we believe the better understanding of it is that of Barnes who said it meant, "Keep a record of it, that it may be preserved and that the fulfillment of it might be noted."[18]

It is of very great significance that Daniel himself made no claim whatever to a full understanding of what he recorded. Even believing commentators often make the gross error of assuming that no prophet ever wrote anything that was not fully understood by the prophet himself, and that it is illogical to look for anything in the prophets that cannot be traced to the prophet's own knowledge or experience.

It would be hard to imagine an error more directly opposed to what the Word of God teaches than is the one just cited. There are examples in both the Old Testament and the New Testament in which prophets plainly declared what they did not understand.

For example, on Pentecost, Peter stated that the promises of the Christian gospel were for them that "were afar off," a plain reference to the Gentiles; yet it took a miraculous vision later to convince Peter that he should go to the home of Cornelius (a Gentile) and baptize him. In the Old Testament, there can hardly be any doubt whatever that Amos was without the foggiest notion of what God's Words through him actually meant, when he stated that the sabbath would be gone, "When the earth is darkened in a clear sky, and the sun goes down at noon."

This error fails to recognize that it was God who spoke "through" the prophets. People who are influenced by this error should read 1 Peter 1:10-12. In that passage an apostle of Christ stripped this common error of every vestige of its validity.