The Lord gives boldness and liberty: (3:17-18)
We have great liberty in our relationship with God through what Jesus has done and through what the Holy Spirit is doing. Liberty is often used with the boldness because when we have the liberty, we have the boldness. Through the Spirit we have the liberty. But we never have the liberty to disobey what the Spirit has said in the word of God. That is a demonic liberty, not a Spirit-led liberty! Because of the great work of the Holy Spirit in us through the new covenant, we have a boldness and we are liberated and we have relationship with God. The liberty we have through the Spirit is liberty from the yoke of the law, from sin, from disobedience, from hardness, from death, from hell.
With unveiled faces we can behold the glory of the Lord. The verse (3:18) is the climax of the paragraph. We can share the glory of the Lord through the ministry of God. Moses went up the mountain to have fellowship with God, Aaron goes inside the holy of holies only once a year. But we have direct access to God anytime and every time. Moses reflected the glory of God, but we radiate the glory of God through Christ. When we meditate on God’s Word, then the Spirit transforms us! We become more like the Lord Jesus Christ and we grow “from glory to glory.” This wonderful process cannot be achieved by keeping the Law but only through God’s grace. The glory of the Law faded away, but the glory of God’s grace continues to increase in our lives and make us like Christ.
Further the glory was permanently radiating through the lives of every person. The New covenant transforms the lives of the people.
The word “beholding” means more than a casual look, it means careful study of the word of God. Looking into “God’s mirror,” is looking into God’s love, grace, His peace and God’s righteousness. We will see our lives too being transformed with the same qualities. This is God’s great design in our salvation, “for whom He foreknew, He also predestined to be conformed to the image of His Son” (Rom.8:29). Calvin speaks to this great design of God: “that the image of God, which has been defaced by sin, may be repaired within us . . . the progress of this restoration is continuous through the whole of life, because it is little by little that God causes His glory to shine forth in us.”
The work of transformation is a process. We are being transformed. It isn’t complete yet, and no one should expect it to be complete in themselves or in others. The work of transformation is a continual progression. It works from glory to glory. It doesn’t have to work from “backsliding to glory to backsliding to glory.” God’s work in our lives can be a continual progression, from glory to glory. Therefore we have access to God and this has been made possible only through the New Covenant. Because of the New Covenant we have the Spirit and the spirit makes us free indeed and transform our lives. We don’t achieve or earn spiritual transformation by beholding as in a mirror, but we simply put ourselves in God where we can be transformed by the Spirit of the Lord. This is the greatest mystery which is revealed in the New Covenant given to us through the Lord Jesus Christ.