고린도후서 3

A letter from Christ

¹Are we starting to recommend ourselves all over again? Or do we need letters of introduction to you or from you, the way some people do? Surely not! ²Our letter is you yourselves. It is written in our hearts, and everyone can recognize it and read it.^{a 3}Plainly you are a letter from Christ, produced through our service. It was written not in ink but by the Spirit of the living God, and not on stone tablets but on tablets of flesh, on human hearts.

⁴This is the confidence we have before God, and it comes through Christ. ⁵Not that we are fit for this by our own resources, as if we could count anything as our own doing. Our fitness comes from God. ⁶He has made us fit to be servants of a new covenant, a covenant not of the written letter but of the Spirit. For the written letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

The greater glory of the new covenant

⁷The ministry of death, cut in letters into stone, still came with glory, so bright that the Israelites could not fix their eyes on Moses’ face because of the glory shining there, a glory that was being done away with. ⁸How much more, then, will the ministry of the Spirit come with glory!^{b 9}For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, the ministry of righteousness overflows with far more glory. ¹⁰Indeed, in this respect what was once glorified has no glory at all, outshone as it is by a glory far greater. ¹¹For if what was being done away with had its glory, what remains has glory far greater still.

The veil taken away

¹²So, since this is our hope, we speak with great openness, ¹³not as Moses did when he kept covering his face with a veil, so that the Israelites would not fix their eyes on the end of what was being done away with.^{c 14}Their minds, however, were made hard. Right up to the present day, the same veil stays in place when they hear the old covenant read, and it is not lifted, since it is in Christ that it is done away with. ¹⁵And still today, whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts.^{d 16}But the veil is lifted away whenever a person turns to the Lord.^{e 17}Now this Lord is the Spirit, and freedom is found wherever the Spirit of the Lord is.^{f 18}But all of us, our faces uncovered, look upon the Lord’s glory as in a mirror, and we are being changed into the same image we see, from glory to ever greater glory. That is how the Lord, who is the Spirit, works.^gh