2 Corinthians3chapter 3

2 Corinthians 3:1-3

Do we begin again to commend ourselves? or need we, as some others, epistles of commendation: the rivals at Corinth had arrived with reference letters, and Paul's answer turns the church itself into his credentials, ye are our epistle written in our hearts, known and read of all men. Verse 3 builds the figure into the chapter's whole theology in advance: an epistle of Christ, ministered by us, written not with ink, but with the Spirit of the living God; not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of the heart, and the bench hears Jeremiah 31:33 and Ezekiel 36:26 underneath, the law written on hearts, the stony heart exchanged for flesh. The transformed Corinthians are the new covenant's own handwriting, and the exposition notes that Paul's proof of ministry is changed lives before it is anything else.

2 Corinthians 3:4-6

Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to think any thing as of ourselves; but our sufficiency is of God: the confidence just expressed is immediately grounded outside the man, and the bench reads the pair of verses as the minister's whole psychology, great boldness and no self-trust in one breath. Who also hath made us able ministers of the new testament: the phrase is Jeremiah 31:31's own, the new covenant, the only Old Testament use of that exact term, made with the house of Israel and the house of Judah by Jeremiah's word, and Paul claims its ministry. Not of the letter, but of the spirit: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life: the contrast is not Scripture against feeling but the law as external code, which can sentence and cannot quicken, against the Spirit who writes within, and the commentators guard the clause from the misuse that pits it against the written word the apostle is at that moment writing.

2 Corinthians 3:7-11

If the ministration of death, written and engraven in stones, was glorious: the argument runs three times from the lesser glory to the greater, and the exposition keeps both of its poles at full strength, for the Sinai ministry WAS glorious, God-given, attended by a shining that Israel could not steadfastly behold, and the new ministry exceeds it. Ministration of death and of condemnation name what the law as covenant of works could do with sinners, sentence them, exactly as Romans 7 argues; ministration of the spirit and of righteousness name what the new covenant gives, life and a standing. The comparative is Paul's whole point, that which was made glorious had no glory in this respect, by reason of the glory that excelleth, the moon at sunrise as the bench has long put it. The surpassing of Sinai's ministry by the Spirit's is the text's own teaching and is not a replacement of the people to whom both covenants were given; Jeremiah's new covenant names Israel and Judah as its parties, and the exposition holds that line.

2 Corinthians 3:12-13

Seeing then that we have such hope, we use great plainness of speech: parrhesia, the boldness of a ministry whose glory does not fade, set against Moses, which put a vail over his face, that the children of Israel could not stedfastly look to the end of that which is abolished. The bench reads Paul's use of Exodus 34 carefully: the veil in Exodus concealed the shining; Paul adds the interpretive point that it also concealed the shining's fading, the end, telos, of the passing order, so that the veil becomes a figure for a glory not meant to be final. Nothing here mocks Moses, whose face carried real glory from real communion; the contrast is between an economy that faded by design and one that remains, and the exposition says so in the text's own terms.

2 Corinthians 3:14-16

But their minds were blinded: for until this day remaineth the same vail untaken away in the reading of the old testament: the veil moves in Paul's figure from Moses's face to the readers' hearts, and the apostle writes of his own people with the same grief that opens Romans 9. The exposition handles the verses under the site's standing rulings: the blindness is the partial and temporary blindness Romans 11:25 defines, this is Paul the Israelite describing his kinsmen's present reading, not a verdict licensing the church's contempt, and any use of the passage to teach Israel's replacement runs against the chapter's own next sentence. For verse 16 is the hinge the paragraph exists to reach: Nevertheless when it shall turn to the Lord, the vail shall be taken away, echoing Exodus 34:34 where Moses entering the presence removed the veil; the door stands open, the removal is promised at the turning, and Romans 11:26's Deliverer out of Sion gives the promise its horizon. Which vail is done away in Christ: in him the removal is already accomplished for every reader who turns, Jew first and also Greek.

2 Corinthians 3:17

where the Spirit of the Lord is: Now the Lord is that Spirit: the verse identifies the Lord to whom one turns in verse 16, the Lord of Exodus 34, with the Spirit whose ministry the chapter has been expounding, and the bench states the trinitarian care the sentence requires, not a confusion of persons but an identity of presence and work, to turn to the Lord is to come under the Spirit's unveiling ministry. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty: eleutheria, freedom from the veil, from the condemnation of the letter, from the bondage of fear, and the commentators refuse to shrink the word to any single liberty since the chapter has named several. The exposition notes the verse's standing in the church's own life: the Spirit's presence is known by freedom, and a ministry that binds where God has loosed has left this verse behind.

2 Corinthians 3:18

But we all, with open face beholding as in a glass the glory of the Lord: the chapter ends with Moses's privilege given to the whole church, we all, unveiled, and katoptrizomenoi carries both beholding in a mirror and reflecting, the bench keeping both senses since the verse's own logic needs them, we gaze and we begin to shine. Are changed into the same image from glory to glory: metamorphoumetha, the transfiguration verb, sanctification stated as ongoing transformation by sight, the believer becoming like what he beholds, and from glory to glory answers the chapter's fading glory with one that only increases. Even as by the Spirit of the Lord: the agent is named last, and the exposition closes where the chapter closes, on the Spirit's present, continuing work of making the church into the image of Christ, the ministry of the new covenant doing in every believer what Sinai's stones could never do.