2 Corinthians 3:3 → Jeremiah 31:33

Paul calls the Corinthians "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 Cor 3:3). This is Paul's most explicit echo of Jeremiah 31:33's "I will... inscribe it on their hearts." The "tablets of stone" deliberately recall the Sinai tablets (Exod 31:18); the "tablets of human hearts" name the new covenant's interiorized law. Paul reads Jeremiah's heart-inscription through Ezekiel's heart-of-stone/heart-of-flesh imagery (Ezek 11:19, 36:26) and identifies the Spirit as the inscribing agent — supplying what Jeremiah left implicit. The transformed Corinthian church is the visible proof that the new covenant is in force; living people whose changed hearts read as Christ's own letter are the credential of new-covenant ministry (3:1-6). The verse grounds Paul's claim, three verses later, to be a "minister of a new covenant" (3:6). Its telos is the unveiled beholding of 2 Corinthians 3:18: hearts written on by the Spirit are hearts being transformed into His image with intensifying glory as they gaze on Christ — the new covenant's inscription is not law as burden but the Spirit making the glory of the Lord the heart's delight.