<p>3:17 <i>Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty- </i>Where, in the context, is the Spirit of the Lord Jesus? The preceding verses speak of the human heart. Hence F.F. Bruce offers the paraphrase: &quot;Where the spirit of the Lord is, there the heart is free&quot;. This freedom or liberty in the heart is what Paul so often exults in, comparing it to the bondage of legalism (Rom. 8:21; 1 Cor. 10:29; Gal. 2:4; 5:1,13).</p><p>The Jews believed that the <i>shekinah</i>, the physical light of glory associated with the tabernacle, was somehow a personal being associated with a Messiah figure. Paul deconstructs this idea in 2 Cor. 3:17,18, where he says that the <i>shekinah</i> seen on the face of Moses was a <i>fading</i> glory of the Old Covenant, having been made insignificant by the glory of Christ. Thus Paul is attacking the common Jewish idea by saying that the Lord Jesus was <i>not</i> the <i>shekinah</i> but is <i>superior</i> to it. Indeed, he so often makes the same point by stressing that the glorification of the Lord Jesus was at His resurrection and ascension. He <i>became</i> &quot;the Lord of glory&quot; by what He suffered, and received this glorification at the resurrection and ascension. If the Lord's glory was somehow pre-existent before that, the wonder and personal significance of the resurrection for Jesus is somehow lost sight of; the idea of suffering and <i>then</i> being glorified, as a pattern for us, is quite lost sight of. And yet this was the repeated theme of Paul's inspired writings. Note in passing how when describing the <i>shekinah </i>cloud in which the Angel dwelt, Paul comments that the cloud was mere water, for at the Red Sea it played a part in symbolizing Israel's baptism &quot;into Moses in the cloud water above them and in the sea water on both sides of them&quot; (1 Cor. 10:2). Moses and not the <i>shekinah</i> cloud was the type of Christ. Yet Justin Martyr and many other careless Bible readers, coming to Scripture in order to seek justification for their preconceived Trinitarian ideas, have interpreted the cloud as being the Angel which was supposedly Jesus. Hebrews 1 clarifies that God spoke in Old Testament times through Angels and prophets- but <i>not</i> through His Son. This He began to do in the ministry of the human Jesus. That path of thought alone should remove all possibility that any Old Testament Angel was in fact the Lord Jesus.</p>