“But thou, O Daniel,
shut up the words,
and seal the book,
even to the time of the end:”
(Daniel 12:4)
The Book of Daniel was sealed, closed to our understanding, until the time of the end. The Glory of God, Bahá’u’lláh, has broken the seals on the book of Daniel and has explained to us the meanings of the words that were shut up until the time of the end. The unsealing was done through the revelation of The Book of Certitude, by Bahá’u’lláh. Here is a partial description of that book:
“Within a compass of two hundred pages it proclaims unequivocally the existence and oneness of a personal God, unknowable, inaccessible, the source of all Revelation, eternal, omniscient, omnipresent and almighty; asserts the relativity of religious truth and the continuity of Divine Revelation; affirms the unity of the Prophets, the universality of their Message, the identity of their fundamental teachings, the sanctity of their scriptures, and the twofold character of their stations; denounces the blindness and perversity of the divines and doctors of every age; cites and elucidates the allegorical passages of the New Testament … unfolds the meaning of such symbolic terms as “Return,” “Resurrection,” “Seal of the Prophets” and “Day of Judgment”; adumbrates and distinguishes between the three stages of Divine Revelation; and expatiates, in glowing terms, upon the glories and wonders of the “City of God,” renewed, at fixed intervals, by the dispensation of Providence, for the guidance, the benefit and salvation of all mankind.” (Shoghi Effendi, God Passes By, p. 183)
Unsealing the book of Daniel demonstrates the authority of Bahá’u’lláh to interpret the Bible. The Book of Certitude is an invaluable aid to coming to a deeper understanding of scripture, and for this reason much of this Bible study is based on passages from it.