It is said that "God's divine intervention makes up a history, the history of salvation, and this history gives all other history its meaning" (Oscar Cullmann).

          The main question is this: where does the intervention of God stop? There can be a number of possibilities: God's intervention can be a line between normal history and divine history or there is a short line and after that there is a history that has to get its meaning always from the past.

          The question rises whether the events of the Bible are similar or different from ours today? Are there still sticks that change into snakes or water that becomes sweeter?

           There are people who will tell you that these things still happen. They say it is just the faithlessness of the people that causes them not to identify these cases. Here lies the big knot. In the Bible times it was even the unfaithful who were audience to these miracles like the case with Darius that saw Daniel and the lions that did not smell him. There are cases like Hararan Popoff who drank poison and nothing happened to him. The unfaithful communistic doctor could not explain this. Then again there is a book that explains the martyrs through the ages and their martyrdom in detail like Foxes Dictionary of the Martyrs.

            Was the people of the Bible era more supersitious than we are and we more superficial than they? Or was there really a dispensation when God decided to stop with Salvation-History in the manner that was recorded in the Bible?

             The Holy Spirit as Editor allowed all the books that were written about Enoch's faithfulness to be destroyed and three or four lines are all that we know of Enoch in the whole Bible. Why is Enoch's modus operandi not applicable or helpful to post-deluvial people? Because Enoch lived longer than post-deluvial people, Enoch's DNA was stronger than post-deluvial people. Detail for the Holy Spirit of history before the Flood could be found in the Creation by God, the institution of the week and the Sabbath and after that hop and skip over 1650 years to the Flood in one-liners to seriously start with the history of Noah.

              People who lived 500 years, then 400 then 300 then 200 then 100 like unto our days, cannot compare to the millenium-nics of the pre-flood period. Salvation-history for the Holy Spirit was then to select highlights in the lives of faithful sinners and sinners who became faithful and sinners who denied faith but always the faith line as main theme.

             All revelation, all inspiration, all illumination were directed to that one event around which all events in heaven and earth were to turn, the birth, life and death of Christ. But it was not to stop in 31 CE as Calvinists and other Protestants are keen to uphold, it was to continue until the new heaven and earth is created and eternity starts or heaven is regained. That is where the Holy Spirit decided to stop His editing work with selectiveness of Salvation History, the Book of Revelation by John.

             I was a reader for prof. dr. Hans LaRondelle of his unpublished book that will be edited by dr. Jon Paulien, as Daniel LaRondelle, the son of dr. LaRondelle informed me. In my reading of dr. LaRondelle's manuscripts, I suggested that the greatest problem of the analyzers of the Bible from the 1960s and 1970s and 1980s is that they used the methodology of Walther Eichrodt. Eichrodt wrote two volumes on the Theology of the Old Testament. What he did was to count the verses and weigh the volume of data in a statistics that indicated to him the existence or non-existence of a theological thought or idea. Ideology was reconstructed for the past, by Eichrodt, by thinking that if there is no presence of eschatology in a book, then there was no eschatology in those days or eschatological understanding in Israel in those days. The same with resurrection, angels, and all the topics you can think of in theology and religion. Absence of data means absence of the existence of an idea. This axiom in the methodology of Eichrodt is the major flaw in his works and all his writings are thus falling apart just because of this flaw. The reality is just the opposite. Absence of emphasis on an aspect meant a thorough and correct understanding of the issues and presence of data concerning theology, angels, eschatology, resurrection, etc, simply means that the neglected had to be re-educated and re-instituted. That is how the law-giving at Sinai should be seen. The covenant that included the lawgiving, was made also with their patriarchal fathers Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. Joseph included as Galatians 3:15-16 meant to say, but New Testament scholars wish to see only Abraham here. Some lecturers in the Seventh-day Adventist seminaries and theological schools and otherwise, are coming from non-SDA schools and their textbooks and Bible commentaries were woven with Eichrodtism. The result is that they use the same Eichrodtian jargon to explain theological concepts. That is not the reality of the past and neither the intent of the Holy Spirit or the Bible.

              Take Genesis 3:15 for example: "He [Satan the snake] will bite you in the heel, but you will crush his head". In essence it means that humanity will die because of the bite of Satan, including Christ the Messiah, but humanity, through the vicarious appearance and work of Christ will at the cross and in the eschaton crush Satan's head. You have eschatology here in Genesis 3:15 in the heart of Eden at the Fall of Man. That is 1665 years before the Flood which was in 2523 BCE. This theory that eschatology or resurrection or Satan stories were connected to Zoroastrianism in the Persian period is an inreading into the Bible or superimposition of a system that is dated more than 300 years after John the Revelator finished his book in 96 CE. All sources on Zoroastrianism are late. You need faith to take it back to the days of Cyrus and Darius et al. Why would someone want to have faith in late Zoroastrian sources to cancel his own faith from the explicit sayings of the Bible? What a foolish move? Welcome to Eichrodtism.

             There is the concept that prophecy started only with Elijah et al. Samuel was a prophet, Moses (1530-1410 BCE) was a prophet, Enoch was a prophet. Some Calvinist professors used to say that the word nevi only means that they were preachers. Like the modern preacher. With the modern preacher there were no theophany, dreams, visions, oral instructions. Moses, Samuel, Elijah et al received all these.

             It is not a good thing to try to draw precise lines in our analysis of the process of revelation, inspiration and illumination in the Bible. As Leroy Froom said: "It is difficult to draw precise lines in the experience of a person who is fully under the influence of the Holy Spirit. No formula can be specific, no precise definition can be spelled out" (Leroy Froom, Movement to Destiny page 5). On pages 100-104 of the same book, Leroy Froom said that inspiration is one of the most neglected subjects that needs some more attention.

           My own suggestion to investigators of the subject of inspiration, revelation or illumination, canonization, biblical tradition, biblical theology, doctrines, biblical authority is that we start our investigation with the Holy Spirit as Editor, then His selectivity, filtering functions, support, source guidance, selectivity in source citations, His intention to shake up the data like a rubicon for humans to play with for centuries. Human systematics of biblical data which fail to see these Holy Spirit product-formation aspects, and the exact outcome of that formation aspects, will not be able to analyze the Bible theology properly. To take the data of the Bible as is (status quo) in a static way and then to allocate dates to the data based on beginning and end, early and later categories and then to look for presence or absence of ideas, is doing theology the Eichrodtian way.

          Anyone who says they have not seen a Heavenly Sanctuary or Investigative Judgment in the Bible has not played enough with the Holy Spirit rubicon. Not because the pioneers found it in the Bible but because the Bible is fuller of it than the pioneers even imagined.