Lorenzo Palon

Pip: Lorenzo Palon writes about the kind of Bible verses that look like they're arguing with each other — and it turns out the resolution requires actually reading both of them.

Mara: That's the territory today: how God speaks across the Old and New Testaments, and what a careful Trinitarian reading does to apparent contradictions in Scripture. Let's start with Hebrews 1:1 and John 5:37.

Did God Speak? Hebrews 1:1 and John 5:37

Pip: Here's the apparent problem: Hebrews says God spoke through the prophets, and Jesus says his listeners had never heard the Father's voice. Those two claims look like they're aimed at each other.

Mara: The post sets up the tension clearly, then frames the resolution this way: "God's revelation is Trinitarian: the Father truly spoke through the prophets, yet he is fully and decisively made known through the Son, by the power of the Holy Spirit."

Pip: So the two verses aren't canceling each other out — they're describing different registers of divine speech. The prophets carried real revelation; the Son is its culmination.

Mara: Right, and the post is careful about what Jesus actually means in John 5:37. He's addressing specific religious leaders who rejected him — not issuing a blanket statement about all of biblical history. The next verse is the key: "But you do not have His word abiding in you, because whom He sent, Him you do not believe."

Pip: Which makes the indictment sharper, not softer. These are people who had the text, honored Moses, claimed devotion to God — and still missed what the text was pointing toward.

Mara: The post calls it a tragic spiritual blindness: possessing Scripture without receiving the God Scripture witnesses to. And it extends that warning forward — knowledge of doctrine, church membership, even preaching don't automatically constitute hearing God's voice.

Pip: There's also a section on theophanies and Christophanies — the move some make to say every Old Testament appearance of God was specifically the pre-incarnate Son.

Mara: The post takes that instinct seriously but pushes back on making it an absolute rule. The concern is Trinitarian: if every Old Testament revelation is assigned exclusively to the Son, you quietly imply the Father was absent from Israel's history, which isn't the biblical picture. The Persons are distinct but their works are inseparable.

Pip: So the correction isn't "the Father acted alone" or "the Son acted alone" — it's that the one God acts through the Son and by the Spirit, always.

Mara: Hebrews 1:2 lands the point: "Has in these last days spoken unto us by His Son." Not a new God, not a replacement revelation — a decisive, climactic one.

Pip: The prophets were real messengers. The Son is the message they were pointing at.

Mara: That's the coherence the post is after — not flattening the distinction between the Testaments, but reading them as one continuous, Trinitarian self-disclosure.

Pip: So the question underneath all of this is whether you can hold Scripture and miss the God it's about — and apparently yes, you can.

Mara: The post makes that warning personal, not just historical. More on how Scripture reads across the Testaments next time.