… ¹⁶but whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away. ¹⁷Now the Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty. ¹⁸But we all, with unveiled face, beholding as in a mirror the glory of the Lord, are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory, just as from the Lord, the Spirit.

“But” marks one of the greatest revolutions in the history of God’s people. This is an epochal upheaval of everything spiritual and religious. A mystery, yet a wonderful truth: “Whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.” All religious efforts comprise human effort to see into the mysteries of God, to discover how to appease the deity, unity with the ultimate truths of existence—yet they are all bounded by a colossal veil, beyond which they simply cannot see. In cosmological terms, when scientist-philosophers refer to the Big Bang, the ultimate singularity from which they say all matter has come, they admit to the veil, for they cannot conceive what happened before or prior to the so-called Big Bang. Some, admitting they cannot know, therefore declare themselves uninterested. However they have simply acknowledged the veil that no one can break through. People of all philosophies, religions, and scientific endeavors admit the limitation, but they continue their vain pursuit of truth. They have hardened themselves to the very thing that takes them behind the veil, and they do it with nonsense like the dictum, “There is no such thing as absolute truth.”

Paul boldly writes, “Whenever a person turns to the Lord, the veil is taken away.” Freedom rings: “there is liberty.” But it is not achieved by trying to burst through the veil, but by turning one’s sights away from the veil to the Lord Jesus Christ.

Paul switches to analogy, for logical words fail to fully express the truth. When we look to the Lord (here we take this to mean the Lord Jesus Christ), we are unveiling our eyes and looking, as it were, into a mirror, seeing the glory of the Lord—not in the face of Moses, but in our own faces. It is no longer “out there” but “in here”—that is, the glory of God becomes the experience of each believer. As we continue to look to Him, we see Him in increasing glory—a glory that is not fading but growing, as it were, “from glory to glory.” And we see that in ourselves as we reflect His glory. We are being transformed in a way that eclipses the transformation Moses experienced, fading as it was.

We, like the Corinthians, need to set our sights high, looking into the face of Christ and Him crucified, the glory of God the Father. His glory is unfading.

Lord, thank You for transforming me into Your glory, which is every increasing.