3:1 Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Or do we need, as some, letters of commendation to you or from you?
3:2 You are our letter, written in our hearts, known and read by all people,
3:3 revealing yourselves, that you are a letter of Christ, ①delivered by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of ②human hearts.
▷ ①Lit served ②Lit hearts of flesh
3:4 Such is the confidence we have toward God through Christ.
3:5 Not that we are adequate in ourselves so as to consider anything as having come from ourselves, but our adequacy is from God,
3:6 who also made us adequate as servants of a new covenant, not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.
3:7 But if the ministry of death, engraved in letters on stones, came ①with glory so that the sons of Israel could not look intently at the face of Moses because of the glory of his face, fading as it was,
▷ ①Or in glory
3:8 how will the ministry of the Spirit fail to be even more with glory?
3:9 For if the ministry of condemnation has glory, much more does the ministry of righteousness excel in glory.
3:10 For indeed what had glory in this case has no glory, because of the glory that surpasses it.
3:11 For if that which fades away was ①with glory, much more that which remains is in glory.
▷ ①Lit through
3:12 Therefore, having such a hope, we use great boldness in our speech,
3:13 and we are not like Moses, who used to put a veil over his face so that the sons of Israel would not stare at the end of what was fading away.
3:14 But their minds were hardened; for until this very day at the reading of the old covenant the same veil ①remains unlifted, because it is removed in Christ.
▷ ①Or remains, it not being revealed that it is done away in Christ
3:15 But to this day whenever Moses is read, a veil lies over their hearts;
3:16 but whenever someone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.
3:17 Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom.
3:18 But we all, with unveiled faces, looking as in a mirror at the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.