2 Corinthians 3:18

18. Thus emancipated by the spirit of evangelic liberty from the vail upon the heart, (which was also a vail upon the eyes,) we, the free and freshly un-Judaized Christians, with open Or, more accurately, unvailed faces, behold the glory of the Lord. Happier than Israel, to whom even Moses was vailed, we behold the glory of Jesus himself without a vail. Yet not, indeed, as yet, his living person; but his glorious image in the gospel, as in a mirror. The ancient mirror was not glass, but polished metal.

Are changed Are metamorphosed, transformed, transfigured. It takes a degree of likeness of nature for one being to see and realize another. Man can understand man as brute cannot understand man or man brute. We possess some assimilation to Jesus, even in order to discern him truly in the gospel; and the more we gaze in sympathy upon him the more we cognise him and become like him, which again increases our perceptive power, and thus there is a constant interaction and progress.

Into the same image As Moses, looking upon the glory of Jehovah, had his face irradiated with the same glory.

From glory By sanctification on earth.

To glory By glorification, conformity with the glorified image of Christ, in heaven. This is better than to read: From the causative glory of the image in the mirror to the caused glory we acquire from it.

By the Spirit of the Lord Which 2 Corinthians 3:6 vivifies with both sanctifying and glorifying life; life spiritual and life eternal. This entire imagery, in which St. Paul expresses the power of evangelic liberty (as opposed to the letter slavery of the Judaists) of glorifying the believer into the glorious image of Jesus, is eminently beautiful. But no reader who would appreciate its full richness must stop here, (though induced so to do by the unfortunate chapter division,) but trace its continuity through to 2 Corinthians 4:6.