2 Corinthians 3:4-18 Empowered for Ministry in God's Name

So we continue our journey through Paul’s second letter to the Church in Corinth.

Paul makes it very clear that we are God’s children. We are loved by God; we are accepted by Him and we are empowered for ministry in God’s name. We aren’t competent, we aren’t capable, we aren’t worthy enough on our own. Our endorsement, our mandate to serve as Jesus’ disciples comes from God alone.

V6. God has made us competent ministers of a new Covenant – not of the letter, but of the Spirit – for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.

We talk about the letter of the law – the nitty gritty – the legal detail – every jot and tittle and we also speak of the Spirit of the law – the essence, the heart. 

William Barclay writes:- Our adequacy comes from God, who has made us adequate to be ministers of the new relationship which has come into existence between God and humanity. This new relationship does not depend on a written document, but on the Spirit. The written document is a deadly thing; the Spirit is a life-giving power. If the ministry which could only produce death, the ministry which depends on written documents, the ministry which was engraved on stone, came into being with such glory that the children of Israel could not bear to look for any time at the face of Moses, because of the glory which shone upon his face--and it was a glory that was doomed to fade, surely even more will the ministry of the Spirit be clad in glory.

This passage really falls into two parts. At the beginning of it Paul is feeling that perhaps his claim that the Corinthians are a living epistle of Christ, produced under his ministry, may sound a little like self-praise. So he hastens to insist that whatever he has done is not his own work, but the work of God. It is God who has made him adequate for the task which was his. It may be that he is thinking of a meaning that the Jews sometimes gave to one of the great titles of God. God was called El Shaddai which is The Almighty, but sometimes the Jews explained El Shaddai to mean The Sufficient One. It is he who is all-sufficient who has made Paul sufficient for his task.

When Harriet Beecher Stowe produced Uncle Tom's Cabin, 300,000 copies were sold in America in one year. It was translated into a score of languages. Lord Palmerston, who had not read a novel for thirty years, praised it "not only for the story, but for the statesmanship." Lord Cockburn, a Privy Counsellor, declared that it had done more for humanity than any other book of fiction. Tolstoy ranked it among the great achievements of the human mind. It certainly did more than any other single thing to advance the freedom of the slaves. Harriet Beecher Stowe refused to take any credit for what she had written. She said, "l, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin? No, indeed, I could not control the story; it wrote itself. The Lord wrote it, and I was but the humblest instrument in his hand. It all came to me in visions, one after another, and I put them down in words. To him alone be the praise!"

Her adequacy was of God. It was so with Paul. He never said, "See what I have done!" He always said, "To God be the glory!" He never conceived of himself as adequate for any task; he thought of God as making him adequate. That is precisely why, conscious as he was of his own weakness, he feared to set his hand to no task. He never had to do it alone; he did it with God.

The second part of the passage deals with the contrast between the old and the new covenant. A covenant means an arrangement made between two people through which they enter into a certain relationship. It is not, in the biblical usage, an ordinary agreement, because the contracting parties enter into an ordinary agreement on equal terms. But in the biblical sense of covenant, it is God who is the prime mover and approaches humanity to offer us a relationship upon conditions which we could neither initiate nor alter, but only accept or reject.

The word Paul uses for new when he speaks of the new covenant is the same as Jesus used and it is very significant. In Greek there are two words for new. First, there is neos, which means new in point of time and that alone. A young person is neos because he is a newcomer into the world. Second, there is kainos, which means not only new in point of time, but also new in quality. If something is kainos it has brought a fresh element into the situation.

It is the word kainos that both Jesus and Paul use of the new covenant, and the significance is that the new covenant is not only new in point of time; it is quite different in kind from the old covenant. It produces between humanity and God a relationship of a totally different kind.

Wherein does this difference lie?

(i) The old covenant was based on a written document. We can see the story of its initiation in Exodus 24:1-8. Moses took the book of the covenant and read it to the people and they agreed to it. On the other hand the new covenant is based on the power of the life-giving Spirit. A written document is always something that is external; whereas the work of the Spirit changes a person's very heart. A person may obey the written code, while all the time they wish to disobey it; but when the Spirit comes into their heart and controls it, not only do they not break the code, they do not even wish to break it, because they are changed as people. A written code can change the law; only the Spirit can change human nature.

(ii) The old covenant was a deadly thing, because it produced a legal relationship between God and humanity. In effect it said, "If you wish to maintain your relationship with God, you must keep these laws." It thereby set up a situation in which God was essentially judge and humanity was essentially a criminal, forever in default before the bar of God's judgment.

The old covenant was deadly because it killed certain things. (a) It killed hope. There was never any hope that any person could keep it, human nature being what it is. It therefore could end in nothing but frustration. (b) It killed life. Under it a person could earn nothing but condemnation; and condemnation meant death. (c) It killed strength. It was perfectly able to tell a person what to do, but it could not help them to do it.

The new covenant was quite different. (a) It was a relationship of love. It came into being because God so loved the world. (b) It was a relationship between a father and his children. Humanity was no longer the criminal in default, they were children of God, even if a disobedient child. (c) It changed a person's life, not by imposing a new code of laws on them, but by changing their heart. (d) It therefore not only told a person what to do but gave them the strength to do it. With its commandments it brought power.

Paul goes on to contrast the two covenants. The old covenant was born in glory. When Moses came down from the mountain with the Ten Commandments, which are the code of the old covenant, his face shone with such a splendour that no one could look at it (Exodus 34:30). Obviously that was a transient splendour. It did not and it could not last. The new covenant, the new relationship which Jesus Christ makes possible between humanity and God, has a greater splendour which will never fade because it produces pardon and not condemnation, life and not death.

Here is the warning. The Jews preferred the old covenant, the law; they rejected the new covenant, the new relationship in Christ. Now the old covenant was not a bad thing; but it was only second-best. As a great commentator has put it, "When the sun has risen the lamps cease to be of use." As has been so truly said, "The second-best is the worst enemy of the best." People have always tended to cling to the old even when something far better is offered. Human nature; stay with the ‘tried and true.’

Churches all over the world often cling to the old and refuse the new. Because a thing was always done, it is right, and because a thing was never done, it is wrong. We must be careful not to worship the stages instead of the goal, not to cling to the second-best while the best is waiting, not, as the Jews did, to insist that the old ways are right and refuse the new glories which God is opening to us.

All the pictures in this passage emerge directly from the passage which goes before. Paul begins from the thought that when Moses came down from the mountain the glory upon his face was so bright that no one could gaze steadily upon it.

(i)            He thinks back to Exodus 34:33. Moses put a veil over his face when he had finished speaking. Paul takes this to mean that Moses veiled his face so that the people should not have to see the slow fading of the glory that once was there. His first thought is that the glory of the old covenant, the old relationship between God and humanity, was essentially a fading one. It was destined to be surpassed, not as the wrong is surpassed by the right, but as the incomplete is surpassed by the complete.

The revelation that came by Moses was true and great, but it was only partial; the revelation that came in Jesus Christ is full and final. As Augustine so wisely put it long ago, "We do wrong to the Old Testament if we deny that it comes from the same just and good God as the New. On the other hand we do wrong to the New Testament, if we put the Old on a level with it." The one is a step to glory; the other is the summit of glory.

(ii) The idea of the veil now takes hold of Paul's mind and he uses it in different ways. He says that, when the Jews listen to the reading of the Old Testament, as they do every Sabbath day in the synagogue, a veil upon their eyes keeps them from seeing the real meaning of it. It ought to point them to Jesus Christ, but the veil keeps them from seeing that. We, too, may fail to see the real meaning of scripture because our eyes are veiled.

(a) They may be veiled by prejudice. We, too, often go to scripture to find support for our own views rather than to find the truth of God.

(b) They may be veiled by wishful-thinking. Too often we find what we want to find, and neglect what we do not want to see. To take an example, we may delight in all the references to the love and the mercy of God, but pass over all the references to his wrath and judgment.

(c) They may be veiled by fragmentary thinking. We should always regard the Bible as a whole. It is easy to take individual texts and criticize them. It is easy to prove that parts of the Old Testament are irrelevant or outdated. It is easy to find support for private theories by choosing certain texts and passages and putting others aside. But it is the whole message that we must seek; and that is just another way of saying that we must read all scripture in the light of Jesus Christ.

(iii) Not only is there a veil which keeps the Jews from seeing the real meaning of scripture; there is also a veil which comes between them and God.

(a) Sometimes it is the veil of disobedience. Very often it is moral and not intellectual blindness which keeps us from seeing God. If we persist in disobeying him we become less and less capable of seeing him. The vision of God is to the pure in heart.

(b) Sometimes it is the veil of the unteachable spirit. "There's none so blind as those who will not see." The best teacher on earth cannot teach the person who knows it all already and does not wish to learn. God gave us free will, and, if we insist upon our own way, we cannot learn his.

(iv) Paul goes on to say that we see the glory of the Lord with no veil upon our faces, and because of that we, too, are changed from glory into glory. Possibly what Paul means is that, if we gaze at Christ, we in the end reflect him. His image appears in our lives. It is a law of life that we become like the people we gaze at. People hero-worship someone and begin to reflect their ways. If we contemplate Jesus Christ, in the end we come to reflect him.

Paul sets for many a theological problem when he says, "The Lord is the Spirit." He seems to identify the Risen Lord and the Holy Spirit. We must remember that he was not writing theology; he was setting down experience. It is the experience of the Christian life that the work of the Spirit and the work of the Risen Lord are one and the same. The strength and guidance we receive come alike from the Spirit and from the Risen Lord.

Where the Spirit is, says Paul, there is liberty - freedom. He means that so long as humanity's obedience to God is conditioned by obedience to a code of laws we are in the position of an unwilling slave. But when it comes from the operation of the Spirit in our heart, the very centre of our being has no other desire than to serve God, for then it is not law but love which binds us. Many things which we would resent doing under compulsion for some stranger are a privilege to do for someone we love. Love clothes the humblest and the most menial tasks with glory. "In God's service we find our perfect freedom."