Unveiled Freedom

This nation just marked two hundred fifty years of independence, and I am not ashamed to say I am thankful for it. I am glad to be an American. I cannot think of any other place in the world I would rather live. We can gather on the Lord's Day with open Bibles and nobody standing at the door demanding a permit, and I am thankful for the men who paid dearly so that we could worship freely. My family went and watched Young Washington in the theater over the holiday weekend, and as Washington fought alongside the Virginians, I could not help thinking that some of my own ancestors were probably there, because I have deep Virginian roots on both my father's side and my mother's. Gratitude for these things, and even some measure of pride in this country, is right and good, and I feel it.

But somewhere that same weekend, in pulpits across this country, preachers stood up with a flag behind them and 2 Corinthians 3 in front of them, read "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom," and told their people it was about America. It is not. A man can be free in all fifty states and still be a slave. He can vote, own property, speak his mind, carry a firearm, and stand before God blind, bound, and condemned.

Paul is talking about a different kind of freedom in this text. A freedom no revolution ever won and no government can ever repeal. The question this passage puts to you is not whether you are a free citizen but whether the veil has come off.

Because the hope of the new covenant is permanent, we speak with boldness, and everyone who turns to the Lord beholds His glory with an unveiled face and is transformed into His image.

So reads the infallible, the inerrant, the all-sufficient Word of the Living God.

Bold Because Nothing Fades

Paul opens with a "therefore," and that word sends us back to verse 11. If that which was being brought to an end came with glory, much more that which remains is in glory. The old covenant faded. The new covenant remains. Because it remains, Paul says, we have hope. Not a wish or a burst of optimism, but a settled confidence anchored in something permanent.

Watch what that hope produces. "We use great boldness." The Greek word means open, plain, unashamed speech. Speech that hides nothing and holds nothing back. New covenant ministers do not whisper the gospel behind a curtain. There is nothing in it that fades, so there is nothing in it to conceal.

That word "boldness" gets its force from the contrast that follows. Paul says we are not like Moses. To feel the weight of that, you need the scene from Exodus 34. Moses had been on the mountain with Yahweh, and he came down not knowing that his own face shone. See what happened next.

Notice the rhythm. Unveiled before Yahweh. Veiled before the people. Charles Hodge, working carefully through this background, observes that the veil kept Israel from ever watching that glory die out on Moses' face. They saw the shine. They never saw the shine fade. The transience of the old covenant was hidden from them behind a piece of cloth.

The LSB translates verse 13 with its usual precision here. Moses veiled his face so that Israel would not look intently at "the consequence of what was being brought to an end." Israel could not see where the fading glory was headed, what it terminated in, what it pointed to. The law's glory was real, but it was a glory with an expiration, and its consequence, its goal, was Christ. Paul says the same thing in Romans 10:4. Israel gazed at the shine and missed the direction of it entirely.

Paul's ministry runs the opposite way. Nothing fading, so nothing veiled. The glory he preaches is permanent, so he preaches it with his face uncovered and his voice raised.

Here is where this lands on you. Timid, apologetic, embarrassed gospel witness is a contradiction of the covenant you serve under. If the glory were fading, hedging might make sense. It is not fading. So when the conversation at work turns to what you did this weekend, do not mumble something vague about church or skip it altogether. When your unsaved coworker asks why you will not join in something, you do not need to change the subject. You serve a permanent covenant. Speak like it. Boldness is not a personality type reserved for the loud among us. This is not about being an extrovert or an introvert. Boldness is the natural voice of a hope that cannot expire.

So the new covenant minister speaks openly because his message never fades. But that raises a hard question. If the message is so open, so plain, so unveiled, why do so many hear it and see nothing?

The Veil Over the Heart

Paul moves the veil. In verse 13 the veil was on Moses' face. In verses 14 and 15 the veil is on Israel's mind and heart. "Their minds were hardened." The problem was never the cloth. The problem was never Moses, and hear me on this, the problem was never the text. Same Moses, same Scriptures, same synagogue reading every Sabbath, as Israel had done for centuries and still did in Paul's day. The defect is not in the Book. The defect is in the reader.

John Gill puts it plainly. The veil on their heart is "the veil of blindness, ignorance of Christ, and the Gospel; of the prophecies of the Old Testament, and even of the law itself, its nature, use, and end." A man can hold the very Scriptures that testify of Christ, read them aloud, memorize them, teach them, and see nothing. That is a heart problem, not a reading problem.

"Until this very day," Paul says. His day, and ours. This is the present, partial hardening of Israel that Paul unfolds in Romans 11. Notice how carefully we have to walk here, because two errors wait on either side. One error says the hardening means God is finished with Israel, that the church has replaced her, that the promises have been quietly transferred. Paul will have none of that. The hardening is partial, and it has an end point. Verse 16 in our text proves it: the veil is removable. A veil that comes off is not a final sentence. God has not thrown Israel away. The other error pretends the hardening is not real, that sincerity in reading Moses is enough. Paul will not allow that either. The veil is real, it lies over the heart, and no amount of religious activity lifts it.

Notice also the last clause of verse 14. The veil "is brought to an end in Christ." Only there. Not by scholarship or tradition or trying harder at the text, but in Christ. Always in Christ.

Do not think this veil is a Jewish problem only. There are people in gospel-preaching churches all over this country who have heard a thousand sermons and seen nothing. The unconverted man in the pew hears the same words the believer beside him hears. One heart burns and one heart sits there, hard as the pew itself. So let this text change how you pray. We pray for preachers, and we should. Pray for hearers. Pray that when the Word goes out, God would do in some heart what no preacher can do. Parents should pray this for their children who sit under the Word every week, children for parents, and certainly all of us for one another. Familiarity with the Bible is not the same as sight.

The veil lies over the heart, and nothing human can lift it. That would be a hopeless place to stop. Paul does not stop there. Verse 16 turns on one small word: but.

Turn, and the Veil Comes Off

Verse 16 is Exodus 34:34 turned into a promise. Remember the rhythm of that passage. Whenever Moses went in before Yahweh, he took the veil off. Paul lifts that very sentence and rewrites it for sinners: whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. The LSB's own marginal note tells you that "Lord" here is Yahweh in the Old Testament background. What Moses did in the tent, every sinner may do in Christ. Turn to the Lord, and the covering comes off.

Look closely at the grammar, because your soul hangs on it. The sinner turns. The veil "is taken away." That verb is passive. Nobody peels off his own blindness. No man reaches up and removes his own veil, any more than a blind man opens his own eyes by deciding to see. The command comes to you: turn. The removal belongs to God. Right here the sovereignty of God and the free offer of the gospel stand side by side in a single verse, and neither one cancels the other. God commands all men everywhere to turn, and God alone takes veils away. So turn. Turn now. The taking away is His work, and He has never once failed to do it for a turning sinner.

Gill saw something more in this verse, and it fits everything Paul says in Romans 11. He read it not only of individual sinners but of Israel as a nation in the latter day, when they shall turn, or be turned, by the Spirit, power, and grace of God to the Lord Jesus Christ, and, in his words, "look upon him whom they have pierced, and mourn, and embrace him as the true Messiah and only Saviour." The same God who takes the veil off one Pharisee on the Damascus road can take it off a nation. He has said He will, and so we rejoice, both for the sinner and for Israel.

Then comes verse 17: "where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom." Freedom from what? The context has already told you. Freedom from the veil of verse 15. Freedom from the hardened mind of verse 14. Freedom from the ministry of condemnation back in verse 9, and from the letter that kills in verse 6. This is liberation of the deepest kind there is.

What This Freedom Is Not

Let me say a word about what this freedom is not, because this verse gets mistreated every year about this time. Paul is not writing about political liberty. He is not writing about 1776 or independence from Great Britain. This verse has nothing to do with American liberty. A preacher who takes this verse and wraps it in a flag has not honored America or God. He has robbed the people he preaches to. If Sovereign Grace Baptist Church believes their citizenship has settled the question of their freedom, then I have helped them stay under the veil while telling them they are free. That is the most dangerous kind of bondage there is: the kind that feels like liberty.

Be thankful for your country. I am. But do not confuse the two freedoms.

Picture a man in a dark room at noon. Heavy curtains drawn. He insists there is nothing outside to see, and inside that room he is telling the truth as he knows it. Then someone else pulls the curtain back, and the whole argument is over in a second. Not because the man got smarter. Because the light got in. That is conversion. The sun was shining the whole time.

Some of you have loved ones who have heard the gospel for years and remain unmoved, and you have started to despair. This verse forbids your despair. The veil that will not yield to your arguments yields instantly to the Spirit of the Lord. Keep speaking the truth to them, but put your confidence where this text puts it. Pray less "Lord, help me find the right words" and more "Lord, take the veil away." He is the only one who ever has.

The veil comes off. Then what? What does an unveiled face actually see, and what does the seeing do? Verse 18 answers, and it may be the greatest single verse on the Christian life in all of Paul's letters.

The Transformation of Beholding

"But we all." Slow down on those three words. Under the old covenant, one man went in unveiled. One. Moses alone stood before Yahweh with an uncovered face while a nation waited outside. Hodge presses this point: the privilege that belonged to Moses alone now belongs to every believer whom the Spirit has set free. Not just the prophets or the apostles or the preachers. The newest believer in the room stands where Moses stood, and stays there. What a privilege it is to be in Christ.

What do we do with that unveiled face? We behold. The word Paul uses means beholding as in a mirror. Where do we look into that mirror? In the Word. The glory of the Lord shines out of this Book to the unveiled eye, and supremely it shines in the face of Jesus Christ, which is exactly where Paul takes this argument in the next chapter.

Watch what the beholding does. "Are being transformed." It is the word Matthew uses for the transfiguration, when Christ's glory broke through on the mountain, and the word Paul uses in Romans 12:2, "be transformed by the renewing of your mind." Present tense. Passive voice. It is happening now, continually, and it is being done to you. You do not transform yourself. You behold, and the Spirit transforms.

John MacArthur has developed this logic as well as anyone: you become like what you behold. Fix your gaze on Christ's glory in the Scriptures, and the Spirit conforms you, degree by degree, to the very image you are looking at. That is Paul's whole doctrine of sanctification in one clause. "From glory to glory." Not from effort to effort or resolution to resolution. The engine of Christian growth is not the grind. It is the gaze.

Understand, this is no license for laziness. The believer works, strives, mortifies sin, and runs the race. But all of that effort draws its power from one place. Show me a Christian who is stalled, cold, and unchanged, and I will show you a Christian whose eyes have drifted. We become like what we behold, and that principle works in both directions. A man who gazes at this world all week will be conformed to this world. A man who beholds the glory of the Lord will be conformed to the Lord.

So ask the question honestly: where do your eyes actually rest through an ordinary week? Count the hours. The screen, the news feed, the video reels, the Facebook, the Instagram, the account balance, the grievance you keep turning over in your mind. Whatever holds the eyes shapes the soul. This is the deepest argument for the ordinary means of grace: the open Bible in the morning, the preached Word on the Lord's Day, the Lord's table. These are not religious duties to check off. They are the mirror. They are where the beholding happens, and the beholding is where the becoming happens.

No Third Place to Stand

Follow the movement of this text one more time. A permanent hope makes bold preachers. That bold preaching falls on veiled hearts, and no human power can lift the veil. Then a sinner turns to the Lord, and God takes the veil away, and the Spirit sets him free. From that moment he stands where only Moses stood, unveiled before the glory, and the glory he beholds begins to remake him into its own image.

Every one of us sits in this text somewhere. Either the veil is still on, or it has been taken away. There is no third place to stand.

If you are reading this without Christ, this passage carries a warning you must not shake off. You can sit under Moses and never see. You can sit under sermons, grow up in a Christian home, own three Bibles, and carry the veil over your heart to your grave. Religion does not remove it, time does not wear it out, and two hundred fifty years of national liberty cannot touch it. You can be a free man in a free country all your days and die a slave, and no document signed in Philadelphia can do for your soul what only the Spirit of the Lord can do.

But see the promise in this same text. The veil "is brought to an end in Christ." The Son of God came, lived the life your law-breaking could never live, and died under the condemnation that ministry of death pronounced on you. God raised Him. The glory Moses only reflected shines full and permanent in the face of Jesus Christ. The same Lord who stopped Saul of Tarsus, the most veiled man in Israel, and tore the covering from his eyes on the Damascus road, is mighty to do it for you today. So turn. Turn to the Lord now, and the veil is taken away. He has never refused a turning sinner, and He will not start with you.

Believer, take the comfort that is yours in this text. The veil does not grow back. The word for "unveiled" carries the sense of a finished removal with a permanent result. God does not re-blind His people. The face He uncovered stays uncovered, and the transformation He began, He will carry from glory to glory until you see Christ as He is and are made like Him.

Behold the Christ

Here is a charge for the week, and I want you to make it concrete. Verse 18 promises that transformation follows beholding. So set a beholding practice for the next six days. Take one Gospel, Mark if you want the shortest, and read a portion every day, not to finish a chapter, but to see Christ. Read until something of His glory catches your eye, and then stop and look at it. Five minutes of real beholding will do more in you than thirty minutes of hurried completion.

One more thing. The fireworks are put away now, and the flags come down and get folded for another year. Let your gratitude for the lesser freedom drive you to the greater one. Thank God for the country. Then behold the Christ. One freedom you inherited. The other, the Spirit of the Lord Himself put in you, and no power on this earth can repeal it.