2 Corinthians 3:3
2 Corinthians 3:33It is clear 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.
Read as describing the effect of Jehovah's active force on people who respond to the good news — hearts changed through study and association rather than through law written on stone. The Watchtower frames the resulting change as something the individual must then maintain through continued effort.
Paul is drawing on and — the promise that God would replace hearts of stone and write his law inside people. He says that promise has landed: you are a letter of Christ, written on hearts of flesh. Notice who does the writing. Not the reader, not the congregation — the Spirit. Ezekiel's grammar is the same: I will give, I will remove, I will put my spirit inside you, and I will cause you to walk. Every active verb belongs to God. That is the thing to offer a Witness who is tired. If the heart has been replaced, effort is not what produced it, and effort is not what keeps it. Paul says a few verses later that our adequacy is from God. There is also a small observation worth having in reserve. The NWT reads "the spirit of a living God," adding an indefinite article before a noun that has no article in the Greek — and here the noun refers to the Father. Nobody thinks Paul meant one living God among several. That is the same construction the NWT renders "a god" at . Compare , .
The NWT reads "the spirit of a living God" where the Greek is pneumati theou zontos — no article, and rendered "the Spirit of the living God" in the KJV, ESV, NASB and NIV. The insertion is significant beyond this verse, because the NWT's defence of "a god" at rests on the claim that an anarthrous theos may be rendered indefinitely. Here the same anarthrous construction refers to the Father and the NWT again supplies "a" — which shows the practice is not tracking deity. It is tracking the absence of an article, and the absence of an article does not carry that weight in Greek.