20:24 gospel of the grace of God Refers to the message of Jesus’ sacrificial death and resurrection, which allows people to be made right before God the Father.

20:25 the kingdom Refers to the kingdom of God, which was inaugurated by Jesus. See note on 1:3; note on Mark 1:15.

20:25 will see my face again. Paul’s statement is based on his own judgment of the situation rather than on divine revelation. Because of continued plots against his life by the Jews (v. 3), the divine revelation that “imprisonment and afflictions” await him (v. 23), and his own intention to focus his future ministry on the western Mediterranean (Rom. 15:23–29), Paul considers it likely that he is seeing the Ephesian elders for the last time. However, it appears that Paul is later able to return to Ephesus after his release from prison in Rome (1 Tim. 1:3).

20:26–28 Paul states that he has completed his responsibilities to the Ephesian believers. Paul can make this statement because he has shared the complete message of the gospel to those in Ephesus and because he now will pass his responsibilities to the elders (or overseers) of Ephesus. The language borrows from 1 Sam 12:2–5, where Samuel declares his innocence and holds the audience accountable.

20:30 from among your own selves. Paul’s prophetic warning in this verse was fulfilled as the Ephesian church was soon to be plagued by false teachers, some of whom apparently were leaders of the church (1 Tim. 1:3, 7, 19, 20; 6:3–5; Introduction to 2 Timothy: Special Issues).

It is important to notice, however, that Paul’s first exhortation to the elders called for them to “guard themselves.”

For Paul, the whole essence of the gospel was found, not in a doctrine or theory, a magic formula or a secret access to a powerful Name by which he could stride through the world making things happen, but that ‘by such work we must support the weak’.

The ‘such work’ in question was, here as before, his own determination to work with his own hands to support himself and his companions. Nobody would ever be able to say that Paul had used his biblical learning, patient study or rhetorical gifts to feather his own nest. He never cast envious eyes on fine clothing or jewellery (Acts 20:33). He was up early and, most probably, late to bed, with his settled hours of prayer and his long stretches of physical work with Aquila and Priscilla in the shop, snatching hours here and there to go and teach in the lecture-room, hurrying round to someone’s house where there was sickness or sorrow, ready at the first sign of a Christian starting to wobble in understanding or behaviour to sit with them, pray with them, weep with them (verse 31) and warn them. He had given, and given, and given.

33 The word of the LORD came to me: 2 “Son of man, speak to your people and say to them, If I bring the sword upon a land, and the people of the land take a man from among them, and make him their watchman, 3 and if he sees the sword coming upon the land and blows the trumpet and warns the people, 4 then if anyone who hears the sound of the trumpet does not take warning, and the sword comes and takes him away, his blood shall be upon his own head. 5 He heard the sound of the trumpet and did not take warning; his blood shall be upon himself. But if he had taken warning, he would have saved his life. 6 But if the watchman sees the sword coming and does not blow the trumpet, so that the people are not warned, and the sword comes and takes any one of them, that person is taken away in his iniquity, but his blood I will require at the watchman’s hand.