OEBcth - II Corinthians - 3

3:1  Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or are we like some who need letters of commendation to you, or from you?

3:2  You yourselves are our letter — a letter written on our hearts, and one which everybody can read and understand.

3:3  All can see that you are a letter from Christ delivered by us, a letter written, not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God, not on ‘tablets of stone,’ but on ‘tablets of human hearts.’

3:4  This, then, is the confidence in regard to God that we have gained through the Christ.

3:5  I do not mean that we are fit to form any judgment by ourselves, as if on our own authority;

3:6  our fitness comes from God, who himself made us fit to be ministers of a new covenant, of which the substance is, not a written law, but a Spirit. For the written law means death, but the Spirit gives life.

3:7  If the system of religion which involved death, embodied in a written law and engraved on stones, began amid such glory, that the Israelites were unable to gaze at the face of Moses because of its glory, though it was but a passing glory,

3:8  will not the religion that confers the Spirit have still greater glory?

3:9  For, if there was a glory in the religion that involved condemnation, far greater is the glory of the religion that confers righteousness!

3:10  Indeed, that which then had glory has lost its glory, because of the glory which surpasses it.

3:11  And, if that which was to pass away was attended with glory, far more will that which is to endure be surrounded with glory!

3:12  With such a hope as this, we speak with all plainness;

3:13  unlike Moses, who covered his face with a veil, to prevent the Israelites from gazing at the disappearance of what was passing away.

3:14  But their minds were slow to learn. Indeed, to this very day, at the public reading of the old covenant, the same veil remains ; only for those who are in union with Christ does it pass away.

3:15  But, even to this day, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies on their hearts.

3:16  ‘Yet, whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil is removed.’

3:17  And the ‘Lord’ is the Spirit, and, where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

3:18  And all of us, with faces from which the veil is lifted, seeing, as if reflected in a mirror, the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into his likeness, from glory to glory, as it is given by the Lord, the Spirit.