1 Are we beginning again to recommend ourselves? Or perhaps we need - like others - recommendation letters to you, or from you?
2 It is you who are our letter, written on your* hearts, known and read by all people.
3 You manifest that you are a letter of Christ, administered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on stone tablets but on tablets of living hearts.
4 Now, such trust we have through Christ toward God.
5 Not that we are fit of ourselves to count anything as from ourselves. Rather, our fitness is from God,
6 who made us also fit as ministers of a new covenant, not of Letter, but of Spirit. For the Letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
7 Now, if the ministry of death, engraved in stone letters, came in glory, so that the sons of Israel could not look into Moses’s face because of the glory of his face - glory that was passing away -
8 how will the ministry of the Spirit not be more in glory?
9 For if the ministry of condemnation had glory, the ministry of righteousness abounds much more in glory.
10 For what was made glorious had even no glory in this respect, because of the glory that excels.
11 For if the transitory comes through glory, much more the permanent comes in glory.
12 Having, therefore, such hope, we use great boldness,
13 also not like Moses, [who] put a veil on his face, so that the sons of Israel could not look toward the end of what is transitory.
14 Indeed, their minds were blinded. For to this day the same veil over the reading of the old covenant remains. [It is] not lifted, because in Christ it is taken away.
15 Indeed, even to this day, when Moses is read, a veil lies upon their hearts.
16 Yet when one turns to the Lord, the veil is lifted away.
17 Now, the Lord is Spirit. And where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
18 And we all, with unveiled faces, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image, from glory to glory, just as by the Spirit of the Lord.
Notes
v 2 Or "our"