Is there a fourth `anchor’ here that helps Paul survive the stresses, and means WE too surely won’t `lose heart` if we grasp it? Indeed yes: it’s what he’s internalized of the incredible joy, privilege, of our message. Amid all his struggles he’s hugely enthusiastic about it – it’s something that’s never happened before in history! – & now he wants to help us catch it too; by comparing our situation joyfully even with that of Moses…
Of course in these verses he also aims, as a leader, to strengthen his readers (cf 1:4), by enthusing us with joy at our shared ministry of witness. (Christian leaders might ask how central that is to our own ministry; or whether we get fired up only by organizational projects?) What he says through this section seems to climax in 4:1: `Since through God’s mercy we have this ministry’, the sheer glory of which is chapter 3’s theme, `we do not lose heart!’ (So Lord, please help me absorb this glory now about the gospel You’ve given us to share!) This builds on the astonishing reality we saw last time, that God’s own nature incarnates through us as we carry out this `ministry of the Spirit’; but what’s so great about what we share?
Paul helps us catch this glory better by taking us back to Exodus (2 Cor 3:6-11). When Moses came down from Sinai, the `tablets of stone’ he brought were accompanied by dazzling glory, Paul says (v7,3). And rightly so; they came from God Himself, and contained instructions we urgently needed. And yet, says Paul, what we ordinary Christians are caught up in now is something not so visible, but actually still more glorious (vv8,9, quite explicitly). It’s an incredible thing for any Jew to dare to say – that what Moses had was simply not as glorious as the treasure we now share! Indeed even as Christians it may stop us sharply in our tracks. However can this be?
V6 explains: God `has made us competent as ministers of a new covenant— not of the letter but of the Spirit; for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.` Now let’s note: sometimes this verse gets ripped out of context and totally misquoted, to say our calling to `minister the Spirit not the letter` is a call to move away from inflexible biblical instructions (usually this is about sexual ethics), and cultivate some vaguely hippy spirit of non-judgmental tolerance. (So that for example, if we really lived by the Spirit not the letter, we’d never be judgmental but ever-tolerant, seeing adulterous remarriage or gay marriage as beautiful & not condemning it whatever the Bible says. Thankfully, this dominant `tolerance` is usually seen as misconceived when faced with, say, paedophilia.) But as we look at the context we see it’s not saying that kind of thing at all. `The letter` refers very specifically to the old testament’s central moment of verbal revelation. Moses went up Sinai to be with God, and brought back (v7) the ten commandments `engraved in letters of stone` by the finger of God Himself! And those stone tablets came (v7) with such dazzling glory the Israelites couldn’t even look at him (this is Exodus 34). It was an incredible moment of divine verbal revelation like nothing else in history. But yet, says Paul — what God is doing now, now as we `minister the Spirit’, is something even more glorious. How can this be?
Well: the difference is, first, that in the end, the revelation message Moses brought down was a law that, taken as a whole, no human being could keep or be saved by, so could only `bring death’ and `condemn people’ (v6,7,9). People couldn’t keep God’s law, and indeed (v7), almost as soon as Moses came down the first time, there was judgment & death; the message of God’s law couldn’t `bring righteousness` and relationship with God. So, we may wonder, why did God give that law at all? Well, for several reasons, but above all so that Israel’s whole experience with it should teach all humanity: helping us see there is something in us deeply sinful and bent, we can never earn our way to God by keeping his law, so that above all through this we would see our huge need of a Saviour (cf Gal 3:24). To quote Gooding’s fine illustration, the law Moses brought from Sinai is like a good thermometer; it’s an essential tool for recognizing our sickness, showing us we desperately need help. But a thermometer is not at all the same as medicine that heals us; for that we need to look further. And so that law wasn’t the `good news’; something greater was still to come. Now, says Paul, it has!- we have, and we must share, the wonderful gospel of how Jesus has done everything we ever need, by dying for us then giving us His Spirit: our healing, the solution that `brings righteousness`, has come!
It’s astonishing how people fail to grasp these vital issues. Not long back, two Jehovah’s Witnesses knocked at our door. Then, sitting on our sofa, they explained how, if we kept God’s laws, we could go to paradise. Surely the most depressing message in the world! God’s law: Love the Lord with all your heart, soul, mind and strength; keep that, and you’ll go to paradise? We can’t keep it, we told them; we try, but we fall far short, and so do you. And love your neighbour as yourself? We don’t keep that either; we’re on the way, we hope, but we fail, all the time. We’ll never get to paradise if we have to keep the law. (Well, they admitted, that’s true, but we trust God to be merciful. Interesting, we said: here you are going round this estate preaching keeping the law, yet your hope for your own souls is a faith that somehow God will be merciful!)
So then Paul’s (and our!) message is far more joyous. Set against the bondage offered by cults that ignore the gospel; set, even, against God’s opening lesson for humanity in the old testament, and the vital sense of utter unrighteousness that comes if we really grasp it; the gospel we can carry `out-glories` Moses, shining out as life-giving (2 Cor 3:6), glorious(v8), and liberating (v17)! (Thankyou, Lord!) It’s a huge leap ahead, achieving what no previous religion could ever do. So God has made you and I `ministers` (v6) – channels, carriers – of a new way, a new covenant, and Paul is thrilled about it!
And then comes the next thing that thrills Paul, & that God wants us to take from this passage: the `freedom`, the sheer liberation, of v17. IF we haven’t got to EARN salvation by law, by what we have to DO; if now it’s all been DONE by Jesus dying to pay for our sins on the cross; if there’s no barrier left, nothing we have to do, THEN – that means we can live freely in the glory of God, actually live in his very presence 24/7! The joyous difference, Paul is saying, is that because the gospel of faith does what the law could never do, and because the sin-barrier has been taken away through no effort of ours, it gives us free access, right now, to `look steadily’ into the glory of God (vv7,18)! Back at Sinai, he points out, the people couldn’t face Moses when he returned shining with God’s dazzling radiance, so Moses had to wear a veil (vv7,13). But now in the `gospel of the glory of Christ’ all such `veils` are gone; now we see God freely through `the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ’ (cf 4:3,4,6). That freedom is God’s astounding gift to all who believe; and this, exults Paul, is what our ministry brings!
This is hugely important. `We are very bold… We with unveiled face reflect the Lord’s glory’, drawing near to our God directly, says Paul (3:12,18). It’s the same life-giving insight we find at the heart of Hebrews, where we’re challenged that, unlike old testament Israel, we can have complete `confidence’ to enter the very `holiest of all’ (Heb 10:19-20). In the old testament time sin hadn’t yet been dealt with, so in the temple God’s presence had to be shut off in the holy place behind the veil, and only the high priest could go there, just once a year. (Heb 9:7-9: `The Holy Spirit was showing by this that the way into the most holy place` – God’s heart and presence – had not yet been opened up.) But when Christ died, all the barriers were swept away, and that same temple veil was ripped open dramatically from top to bottom (Luke 23:45). (Hallelujah!) If we’ve been Christians for years, we may have become so accustomed to this that we have lost how huge it is: the cross set us free to be welcome into the very heart of God, `through the veil’, by faith (Heb 10:20,22)…
We do need to use our brains to grasp how revolutionary this is, because human religion can trap us if we don’t. Throughout history human religion has embodied the sense that ordinary people, sinful people, don’t belong in the deepest heart of God, indeed we maybe aren’t even safe there. So we need someone holier than us to operate for us in God’s presence – priests in many religions, or special people like `saints`; (or indeed `Revs`!); not us. (Of course in the new testament the words `priests` and `saints` both refer to all believers.) And there are ways we evangelicals can lose this too, somehow absorbing the wrong sort of fear of God – a feeling that we haven’t done all we should, that therefore we don’t deserve to be in God’s holy presence; that (despite everything the Bible says about the cross) we’re still a bit guilty and our sin is not properly removed. If what we’ve learned from our church is primarily a list of things we mustn’t do (`primarily`, because there are such things, and they do matter), we’ll miss out on that deep enjoyment of God’s presence; we can only have it if we reach out for it as a free gift of loving grace that we couldn’t earn. (Let’s note too: even conservative evangelicals can fail to embody the enormous contrast Paul points to here, slipping back into a life marked primarily by negativity, legalism, and condemnation, rather than by glory; as Watchman Nee says, alluding to this passage, ministering death rather than life…) If we’re focused primarily on anything we have 2 do, either good actions or regular rituals – I’ll get into God’s presence one day in the future IF I do this & this & this, IF I’m regular at church or confession, if I don’t miss mass — there will always be uncertainty about what the future holds, always guilt as to whether I’ve done enough. Protestants can slip into this too: we don’t get to heaven just because we were regular at services, rather we simply need to reach out and take Jesus’ forgiveness! But I mention mass because the official teaching of traditional Catholicism really misses the point here – google `Catholic guilt`: `guilt clings to us… reminding us… that we are dirty sinners who must constantly punish ourselves and atone for our sins` – when the whole point is that we can’t atone, we can’t ever do enough of what we’re supposed to do to earn our way in. Until we grasp what Paul’s saying here, then, there will tend to be a guilty sense that I’m not acceptable yet, that somehow I’m still stuck outside God’s presence.
(Another example: suppose my son had broken a window with a football as an 8 year old. (He never did, but alas I did.) Well, we sort it out, & I pay for it — but a week later I want to watch the World Cup with him and instead of coming in he says, again: Dad, please forgive me. And I say, You’re forgiven, and I’ve paid for the new window! But Dad, please forgive me. I have, I paid! But Dad, please forgive me. I have, come on in and let’s watch the game together!)
`Gospel` means joyous `good news`, and so it is! When Christ died, all the barriers were swept away, the temple veil was ripped from top to bottom, and we’ve been given a way into the very heart of God, `the most holy place`, `through the veil’, by faith (Heb 10:19-22)! But here’s another aspect where the good news gets diluted! It’s amazing to see how many parts of Christendom have adopted an architecture that `recreates the veil’, re-establishing in the churches some area, a `holy place’ separated off by an old testament-style barrier (the Orthodox iconostasis, for example, but some Anglican churches too), behind which only special “priests” can go. What does that say to us? Surely, all too clearly, that the ordinary believer doesn’t quite belong in the deepest heart of God. Like we’ve said, there’s something in our natural “religious” mindset that gets uneasy at this thought of direct encounter with God for everybody; and as our confidence of access to Christ gets weakened, we feel a need for someone holier to do our praying for us; or alternatively, perhaps, we have confidence only to pray safely to someone other than God – to saints, Mary, angels. What a loss – for ourselves and, we even dare say, for the loving Father who longs for the company of each of us! Or again, we are left with a fear of a barrier remaining, of sins still unatoned; of God still needing to be pacified – I have so much guilt, I dare not enter His holy presence. (This sense of a guilty conscience is again precisely the issue in Hebrews: `Since we have confidence to enter the most holy place by the blood of Jesus… let us draw near to God… in full assurance of faith, having our hearts sprinkled to cleanse us from a guilty conscience!’ (10:19-22).) And the result of this sense of exclusion is a `spirituality of sorrow’ still pleading for mercy, rather than one of joy, confidence, and the assurance that God intends for us… I think of the streams of spirituality that repeat `Lord have mercy, Christ have mercy` over & over & over again; which seems so sad, when all that time God our loving Father is wanting us to really relax in His company 24/7… I almost wonder whether He would want to say to us, `Please, listen! I have had mercy on you, can we talk about something else!!`
And often what’s gone wrong here is a doctrinal issue: we’ve lost our grasp of what Scripture so vitally says about God’s grace-gift of free, once-for-all new birth by faith, and the forgiveness and the enormous change that brings in one crucial moment; and as a result we’ve drifted into thinking of spiritual life as a process, that comes – or, alas, goes – just insofar as we keep up a repeated participation in the sacraments. (Or again, to take one example from the Protestant version, various church activities.) In practice, the difference is huge; it means our spiritual lives become marked by a sense of uncertainty and distance from God. The `holy place’ of His heart is no longer where we feel we naturally belong, as our home (already `seated with Christ in the heavenly realms’, as we saw some weeks ago in the wonderful Ephesians 2:6); instead, it becomes somewhere we might possibly reach one day, if we do everything right to the end and if it all goes well. Paul’s gospel offers us far, far more than that (cf too the enthusiastic confidence of Paul’s colleague John in 1 John 5:13-14): the knowledge of once-for-all new birth through faith leads us into a joyous assurance of absolute closeness to God!
We see then, don’t we, how Paul’s thrill here, his outburst about glory, is that of a man who was an intelligent Jew but living by religion, trying every way to earn God’s favour (look at Phil 3:4-8), and experiencing the inevitable sense of failure & guilt because he couldn’t keep the law… And then he discovered the biblical gospel that rejoices over the wonderful sense of direct intimacy with God: Christ has died and paid for our sins, all the barriers have been broken once and for all; receive that by faith and God will bring us right into His presence NOW and permanently. And not because of any good we must do but because of what Christ has done; so that all we have to do is reach out in repentance and take God’s unearned forgiveness by faith; from then on we’re `born again` right into God’s presence, coming with `unveiled faces` right into the heart of God’s glory, to quote the closing verse (v18) of our 2 Corinthians 3. God actually comes to live inside us as we are `born again of the Spirit` (John 3:3,8); or to put it another way, from Ephesians again, because `heaven` is being with Christ, from then on we’re actually `seated with Christ in the heavenly realms’. We may not feel it (except maybe in a few of the best moments of our lives!), but we’re in God’s presence, not as somewhere we might maybe reach when we die if we’ve played our cards right, but as a fact, a free loving gift of God, right now!
Oh, I pray that all of us reading this will grasp how radically joyous is our `gospel of grace` (Paul’s phrase, Acts 20:24), and therefore long to share it! (And there’s even more still in these 2 Cor 3 verses, but that’s enough for this week…!) And as we do so, as we saw last time, the Spirit who is the presence of God is flowing out from each of us who believe. `Ministering the Spirit `means doing something never seen before in history, helping others into this wonderful thing, bringing the Spirit who IS God’s presence into our friends’ hearts, and bringing them right into God’s own heart. All this is the longterm result of what we ourselves do as we share our faith! When our friends eventually receive Christ, they step into God’s presence & never leave it again – because God’s presence, God’s Spirit, always goes with them (and each of us) wherever! All because of the small part we played in this `ministry of glory` Paul is so thrilled about carrying out; it’s utterly worthwhile!
Again — THANK YOU LORD!
Minor PS: I ought to say that the Greek word for Moses’ veil in 2 Cor 3 is not the same as for the temple veil in Heb 10, but the point is surely exactly the same: an exclusion from the heart of God which the gospel triumphantly removes!
