Acts 20:24

Note

On his way to Jerusalem at the end of his third journey, Paul sends from Miletus for the elders of the church at Ephesus and says goodbye. In town after town, he tells them, the Holy Spirit warns him "that chains and afflictions await me" (Acts 20:23). Then he puts his whole life and work into a single sentence.

The speech at Miletus is the only one in Acts that Paul addresses to Christians. Looking back on three years at Ephesus, he says he has been "testifying to Jews and Greeks alike about repentance to God and faith in our Lord Jesus Christ" (Acts 20:21). Just after this verse he speaks of the people "among whom I have preached the kingdom" (Acts 20:25). The gospel of God's grace and the kingdom of God stand side by side as two names for one ministry.

Here the gospel is the noun, euangelion (εὐαγγέλιον), and this is the second and last time the noun appears in Acts; the first was Peter's message of the gospel at the Jerusalem council (Acts 15:7). Here it is qualified, "of the grace of God," and the phrase "the gospel of the grace of God" occurs nowhere else in the New Testament. "Testifying" is diamarturasthai, an aorist infinitive of the verb used in verse 21 for his witness to repentance and faith. "Course" is dromos, a racecourse. At the end of his life Paul writes, "I have finished the race" (2 Timothy 4:7), and Luke uses the same word of John the Baptist: "As John was completing his course" (Acts 13:25).

The KJV reads, "But none of these things move me, neither count I my life dear unto myself, so that I might finish my course with joy." "With joy" (meta charas) stands only in the Textus Receptus, and so does a "nor" (oude echō) that splits the opening into two clauses; without them the BSB has one: "I consider my life of no value to me." The KJV then says "to testify the gospel of the grace of God," and the BSB, "testifying to the good news of God's grace": "gospel" and "good news" here translate one and the same word.

Wesley thinks the words weigh more because of who said them. They "were not uttered by persons like Seneca and Antoninus, who talked elegantly of despising the world in the full affluence of all its enjoyments; but by men who daily underwent the greatest calamities, and exposed their lives in proof of their assertions" Wesley. Matthew Henry writes: "None of these things moved Paul from his work; they did not deprive him of his comfort. It is the business of our life to provide for a joyful death" Matthew Henry.

Acts does not tell how Paul's course ended. A generation later Clement of Rome wrote that when Paul left the world he became the greatest example of endurance 1 Clement 5. It was as he had said at Miletus.

Paul called his whole ministry the testifying to the good news of God's grace. What he told others he had first received as a gift. The verse names the gospel by its source: it is the news of God's grace.