This opens the way for a comparison between the ministry under the one covenant and the ministry under the other. The former, even though its issue was historically failure, condemnation, and death, and while its inferiority was shown by its being engraved on tables of stone (though it was destined to pass away), was nevertheless promulgated in circumstances of dazzling splendour though even that was a splendour that was fading. How much greater must be the splendour belonging to the new covenant, and to its ministry, which has the Spirit in place of a written law, creates righteousness where the other wrought condemnation, and moreover is destined to abide. Even the real glory which attached to the former covenant is cancelled, at least to this extent, by the surpassing glory of the new one. For the glory of the new covenant neither passes away nor is it obscured by any veil, as the old one was. Its ministers have no need to put a veil over their message as Moses did over his face when he promulgated his Law (Exodus 34:33), in order, as Paul here suggests, to hide the fading of the glory. [This, of course, was not the actual intention as represented in the OT. A. S. P.] In one phrase, their minds were hardened, he sums up the fatal consequences, as he conceives them, of the covenant which had these disabilities. And a symbol of its inadequacy was still to be seen in any synagogue. For there the rolls of the Law were punctiliously wrapped in a veil; and a like veil was over the heart of Israel, still unremoved because it could be done away in Christ alone.
The phrase, the old covenant or testament, referring to the Mosaic Law, occurs here for the first time, and is a significant testimony to Paul's consciousness that the new wine of the Gospel demanded new bottles. The words in 2 Corinthians 3:16 are a free paraphrase of Exodus 34:34, applied by Paul to Israel. [When Moses went in to Yahweh he removed the veil. Accordingly, if one now turns to the Lord (i.e. Christ), the veil is removed from the heart. A. S. P.]