Now the Lord is that Spirit. — Better, the Lord is the Spirit. The words seem at first inconsistent with the formulated precision of the Church’s creeds, distinguishing the persons of the Godhead from each other. We apply the term “Lord,” it is true, as a predicate of the Holy Spirit when we speak, as in the Nicene Creed, of the Holy Ghost as “the Lord, and Giver of life,” or say, as in the pseudo-Athanasian, that “the Holy Ghost is Lord;” but using the term “the Lord” as the subject of a sentence, those who have been trained in the theology of those creeds would hardly say, “The Lord” (the term commonly applied to the Father in the Old Testament, and to the Son in the New) “is the Spirit.” We have, accordingly, to remember that St. Paul did not contemplate the precise language of these later formularies. He had spoken, in 2 Corinthians 3:16, of Israel’s “turning to the Lord;” he had spoken also of his own work as “the ministration of the Spirit” (2 Corinthians 3:8). To turn to the Lord — i.e., to the Lord Jesus — was to turn to Him whose essential being, as one with the Father, was Spirit (John 4:24), who was in one sense, the Spirit, the life-giving energy, as contrasted with the letter that killeth. So we may note that the attribute of “quickening,” which is here specially connected with the name of the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:6), is in John 5:21 connected also with the names of the Father and the Son. The thoughts of the Apostle move in a region in which the Lord Jesus, not less than the Holy Ghost, is contemplated as Spirit. This gives, it is believed, the true sequence of St. Paul’s thoughts. The whole verse may be considered as parenthetical, explaining that the “turning to the Lord” coincides with the “ministration of the Spirit.” Another interpretation, inverting the terms, and taking the sentence as “the Spirit is the Lord,” is tenable grammatically, and was probably adopted by the framers of the expanded form of the Nicene Creed at the Council of Constantinople (A.D. 380). It is obvious, however, that the difficulty of tracing the sequence of thought becomes much greater on this method of interpretation.
Where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. — The Apostle returns to the more familiar language. To turn to the Lord, who is Spirit, is to turn to the Spirit which is His, which dwelt in Him, and which He gives. And he assumes, almost as an axiom of the spiritual life, that the presence of that Spirit gives freedom, as contrasted with the bondage of the letter — freedom from slavish fear, freedom from the guilt and burden of sin, freedom from the tyranny of the Law. Compare the aspect of the same thought in the two Epistles nearly contemporary with this: — the Spirit bearing witness with our spirit that we are the children of God, those children being partakers of a glorious liberty (Romans 8:16-21); the connection between walking in the Spirit and being called to liberty (Galatians 5:13-16). The underlying sequence of thought would seem to be something like this: “Israel, after all, with all its seeming greatness and high prerogatives, was in bondage, because it had the letter, not the Spirit; we who have the Spirit can claim our citizenship in the Jerusalem which is above and which is free” (Galatians 4:24-31).