Second Letter to the Corinthians 3

¹ Does this sound like a new attempt to commend ourselves to you? Unlike other people, we need no letters of recommendation either to you or from you,

² because you are yourselves our letter, written in our hearts, that anybody can see and read,

³ and it is plain that you are a letter from Christ, drawn up by us, and written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on the tablets of your living hearts.

⁴ Before God, we are confident of this through Christ:

⁵ not that we are qualified in ourselves to claim anything as our own work: all our qualifications come from God.

⁶ He is the one who has given us the qualifications to be the administrators of this new covenant, which is not a covenant of written letters but of the Spirit: the written letters bring death, but the Spirit gives life.

⁷ Now if the administering of death, in the written letters engraved on stones, was accompanied by such a brightness that the Israelites could not bear looking at the face of Moses, though it was a brightness that faded,

⁸ then how much greater will be the brightness that surrounds the administering of the Spirit!

⁹ For if there was any splendour in administering condemnation, there must be very much greater splendour in administering justification.

¹⁰ In fact, compared with this greater splendour, the thing that used to have such splendour now seems to have none;

¹¹ and if what was so temporary had any splendour, there must be much more in what is going to last for ever.

¹² Having this hope, we can be quite confident;

¹³ not like Moses, who put a veil over his face so that the Israelites would not notice the ending of what had to fade.[*a]

¹⁴ And anyway, their minds had been dulled; indeed, to this very day, that same veil is still there when the old covenant is being read, a veil never lifted, since Christ alone can remove it.

¹⁵ Yes, even today, whenever Moses is read, the veil is over their minds.

¹⁶ It will not be removed until they turn to the Lord.

¹⁷ Now this Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.

¹⁸ And we, with our unveiled faces reflecting like mirrors the brightness of the Lord, all grow brighter and brighter as we are turned into the image that we reflect; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit.