Authentic Christianity requires authentic Christians. And who are authentic Christians?

In 2 Corinthians 3:3, Paul writes:

You show that you are a letter from Christ, the result of our ministry, written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts (NIV84, emphasis mine).

Paul is describing reality, authenticity, that the “proof is in the pudding,” the output, the outcome, what actually happens in life; the “proof” of the true gospel of Jesus Christ is the objective changes in the lives of the believers, the confirming evidence of the reliability, effectiveness, and validity of the gospel he shares. In other words, the changed, healed, transformed lives are evidence that what he is sharing is the truth of God.

But notice what Paul specifies as to how God’s reality works, where God’s healing and saving of sinners occurs; it is happening in reality, the place where sin exists and operates—the hearts and minds of people. God works to write His living law of truth, love, and trust into the operations of the living being to restore and cleanse them. And Paul simultaneously describes and rejects the fraud that has no power to save and heal sinners, for he writes that God’s true salvation is “not with ink” and “not on tablets of stone.”

Paul makes clear that salvation does not happen in legal books—it is not written with ink on ledgers, it is not in a courtroom, or upon stone. Instead, the Holy Spirit does His writing upon hearts and minds, writing God’s code, God’s methods, principles, motives, God’s design law of life, into the operations of our beings. How? By bringing us truth and love that we choose to accept and encode into our very brains, leading to trust so that we are reanimated, reborn, with the Spirit of Christ.

The Ministry That Brings Death

Paul goes on to demonstrate that written laws, external rules outside of a person, do not bring life but death. The Ten Commandments can only diagnose what is wrong; they cannot heal anything—and adjustment of legal records in external books also heals nothing.

Now if the ministry that brought death, which was engraved in letters on stone, came with glory, so that the Israelites could not look steadily at the face of Moses because of its glory, fading though it was, will not the ministry of the Spirit be even more glorious? If the ministry that condemns men is glorious, how much more glorious is the ministry that brings righteousness! (2 Corinthians 3:7–9 NIV84).

What do you hear Paul describing here?

What is the ministry that brought death? The Ten Commandments—how? Because it exposed the terminal sin condition; it showed the corruption in us. The written law is a diagnostic tool that confirms that we are born terminal in sin (Psalm 51:5). The written law functions like an MRI, accurately diagnosing us as dead in trespass and sin (Ephesians 2:1)—and that is all it can do.

But that law was given with glory when Moses’ face radiated God’s reflected glory. How much more glory will come when we are won to trust, surrender our life of sin, are reborn with the life of Christ, and restored to God’s ideal? Then we will radiate God’s glory in character, as Jesus revealed God’s glory when He was on Earth.

This is the call from God to His faithful friends at this time in history, found in the message of the three angels (Revelation 14:6–12): Be in awe of God; see Him for who He is: Creator, Sustainer, the Builder of reality whose laws are design laws of truth, love, freedom; worship Him as Creator; and give Him glory because the hour in human history has come for people to make a right judgment about God.

It is also time to finally see through Satan’s lies, to stop worshiping God as a dictator, punisher, and inflictor of death for legal enforcement’s sake, and realize that sin is deviation from God’s structure, design, living laws, the design laws of life, and it causes fear, selfishness, decay, degradation, and death unless healed by God. So worship Him who made the heavens, earth, sea, and fountains of water, and be transformed in heart and mind to be like Jesus and give Him glory, and reveal His character so others can see the truth and be freed from living in fear and restored to at-one-ment with God.

The Veil

Paul goes on to describe how Moses put a veil over his face to hide the fading glory; he says, by contrast, that we are not like that—instead, we reveal the glory of the Lord in our character. Then he writes:

But their minds were made dull, for to this day the same veil remains when the old covenant is read. It has not been removed, because only in Christ is it taken away. Even to this day when Moses is read, a veil covers their hearts. But whenever anyone turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away (2 Corinthians 3:14–16 NIV84).

What is Paul saying here? A veil is covering their minds, and what is that veil?

Lies, fear, selfishness, distrust of God, the belief that God’s law functions like human law.

When people believe God’s law is functionally no different than the laws of man, imposed rules that require enforcement through externally imposed punishment, they always conclude that God is the source of death inflicted for justice’s sake. This false belief causes them to create legal fictions designed to legally adjust their status before God, to hide their record, to hide themselves, to have something done to God so He won’t see and punish them. But God knows all things, and the way reality works, when one freely chooses to believe such lies, the only thing these false legal theologies do is hide the truth about God from those who believe them. Just as Paul says, their minds are veiled; they do not see the glory of God.

And the veil is taken away only in Christ, who is the truth—the exact representation of the Father. If we have seen Christ, we have seen the Father (John 14:7–9).

We must embrace the truth about God as Jesus revealed, be won to trust, open the heart and be reborn with the life of Christ through the indwelling Spirit (John 3:3). This results in seeing reality enlightened by the Spirit of truth and love, and then we realize that God is for us (Romans 8:31), that God is just like Jesus (John 10:30), that sin is the cause of death (Romans 6:23; James 1:15; Galatians 6:8), not God.

Indeed, God is the one who destroys death through Christ and brings us eternal life as a free gift (Hebrews 2:14; 2 Timothy 1:10). And when we embrace the truth and worship God in truth, we then experience freedom from fear, selfishness, sin, rebellion, guilt, and shame, and we are transformed back into the glory of God—bearing His image as He designed. Note what Paul writes:

Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom. And we, who with unveiled faces all reflect the Lord’s glory, are being transformed into his likeness with ever-increasing glory, which comes from the Lord, who is the Spirit (2 Corinthians 3:17–18 NIV84, emphasis mine).

This is reality being described, the outworking of the law of worship. We become like whatever we worship, whatever we choose to believe, what we encode, and who we choose to trust and love.

By accepting the truth that God is Creator and His laws are design laws, not imposed laws, by believing reality, that sin is not a legal problem but is lethal one, and that God does not use His power to inflict punishment for sin, but uses His power to heal sinners from the damage sin causes, we are set free—free from fear, guilt, shame, free from the spirit of fear with which we were born, free from that desperate drive to survive, to save self, to get ahead, free from the terrors that come on the world because we are reborn with a new life and live in trust to Jesus and are transformed to be like Him. There is freedom only where the Spirit of the Lord is!

The True Gospel Remains Veiled

Paul, in 2 Corinthians chapter 4, repeats and emphasizes how Satan veils the gospel, preventing people from seeing the true glory of God:

And even if our gospel is veiled, it is veiled to those who are perishing. The god of this age has blinded the minds of unbelievers, so that they cannot see the light of the gospel of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God. For we do not preach ourselves, but Jesus Christ as Lord, and ourselves as your servants for Jesus’ sake. For God, who said, “Let light shine out of darkness,” made his light shine in our hearts to give us the light of the knowledge of the glory of God in the face of Christ (3–6 NIV84, emphasis mine).

What is Paul’s gospel?

For I am not ashamed of the gospel of Christ, for it is the power of God to salvation for everyone who believes, for the Jew first and also for the Greek. For in it the righteousness of God is revealed (Romans 1:16–17 NKJV, emphasis mine).

What is the gospel? The righteousness of God! Why is this the gospel, the good news? Because Satan’s war began in heaven over lies about God! His war came to humanity by telling lies about God that Adam and Eve believed. And as long as those lies are believed, minds remain in darkness, in fear, in distrust of God. Thus, Paul tells us that we win this war not with earthly weapons, but with divine weapons that demolish every argument, idea, lie, distortion, and falsehood that “sets itself up against the knowledge of God, and we take captive every thought to make it obedient to Christ” (2 Corinthians 10:3–5 NIV84).

The eternal gospel is the righteousness of God—that God is righteous, good, love, the source of life, but that gospel is veiled to those who are perishing. It is veiled by the god of this age—who is Satan.

How does Satan blind their minds to the righteousness of God?

By replacing the true gospel of the righteousness of God as seen in Jesus, who is the express image of the Father, with a false gospel that teaches Jesus came to take our legal place, be legally condemned by the Father, have all sins of all people placed on Him by the Father, be punished and executed by the Father to pay our legal debt, and then return to heaven to plead, present, offer to the Father His blood, His flesh, His life as a legal payment to assuaged the Father’s wrath, fulfill the Father’s legal justice, propitiate the Father’s anger, erase the legal record of our sins, and procure from the Father a legal ruling that, based on the legal merits of Jesus, He declares us righteous even though we are not.

This is not the gospel. It does not present God as righteous, as Jesus revealed Him to be. It presents God as the source of death, a being from whom we must be protected, and this false gospel veils the minds of those who believe it from seeing God as Jesus revealed Him to be. Thus, they cling to their legal religious claims, place their faith, their security, in the legal mechanism to pay God and hide their sin from Him, and become cognitively fake Christians, who never open their hearts in trust to God to be reborn with the life of Christ. They are the ones Jesus described:

“Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only he who does the will of my Father who is in heaven. Many will say to me on that day, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and in your name drive out demons and perform many miracles?’ Then I will tell them plainly, ‘I never knew you. Away from me, you evildoers’” (Matthew 7:21–23 NIV84, emphasis mine).

How does this happen? Because they worship a god who is like a creature, a being who imposes law and enforces that law through inflicted punishment. Thus, this righteousness of our Creator God is veiled by a false gospel in which God is represented as a punishing judge whom Jesus must do something to in order to prevent Him from hurting us.

And because of God’s design law of worship, they become like the god they worship—Christians in name, but not in heart.

To be an authentic Christian requires we return to the true gospel, the eternal good news that God is righteous, exactly as Jesus revealed Him to be; that the Father is for us and does not need anything done to Him to win Him to help us. But that “God so loved the world that he gave his one and only Son” to save us (John 3:16)—to win us back to trust in Him so we will open our hearts and be reborn with the life of Jesus.

Then, when it is no longer our old fear-driven self living, but Christ living in us (Galatians 2:20) and we are reconciled in heart, mind, function, reality, we become like the believers in Corinth:

[We] show that [we] are a letter from Christ… written not with ink but with the Spirit of the living God, not on tablets of stone but on tablets of human hearts (2 Corinthians 3:3 NIV84, emphasis mine).