Ministers of the New Covenant

3 Are we beginning to commend ourselves again? Surely we do not need, as some do, letters of recommendation to you or from you, do we?^{(A) 2} You yourselves are our letter, written on our hearts, known and read by all, ³ and you show that you are a letter of Christ, prepared by us, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets that are human hearts.^[a](B)

⁴ Such is the confidence that we have through Christ toward God. ⁵ Not that we are qualified of ourselves to claim anything as coming from us; our qualification is from God,^{(C) 6} who has made us qualified to be ministers of a new covenant, not of letter but of spirit, for the letter kills, but the Spirit gives life.^(D)

⁷ Now if the ministry of death, chiseled in letters on stone tablets,^[b] came in glory so that the people of Israel could not gaze at Moses’s face because of the glory of his face, a glory now set aside,^{(E) 8} how much more will the ministry of the Spirit come in glory? ⁹ For if there was glory in the ministry of condemnation,^[c] much more does the ministry of justification abound in glory!^(F)

¹⁸ And all of us, with unveiled faces, seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another, for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit.^(A)