Biblion Bible Commentary
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Take heed to the flock: wolves after my departure
Acts 20:28-38
28 Take heed, therefore, to yourselves and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers, to shepherd the assembly of the Lord and God which he purchased with his own blood. · WEB
The charge to the elders warns that the worst danger will come from inside, and it grounds their duty in the price paid for the flock.
Take heed, therefore, to yourselves and to all the flock. The order is not accidental. A man responsible for others is told to watch himself first, and the sequence is the whole reason the speech has been read to church officers for two thousand years.
The standing of these men is stated in a way that removes any thought of a career. In which the Holy Spirit has made you overseers. They were appointed by God, whatever human hands were laid on them, and their work is described with the shepherd's verb: to shepherd the assembly.
The motive clause is the most textually discussed sentence in the book. The flock is the assembly of the Lord and God which he purchased with his own blood. The copies divide between the assembly of God and the assembly of the Lord, and the final phrase can be rendered either as his own blood or as the blood of his own — meaning his own Son. The English translations divide accordingly, and the division is old and honest.
What survives every reading is what the argument needs. The church belongs to God; it was bought; and the price was blood. An elder's care for a congregation is proportioned not to its size or its usefulness but to what was paid for it, and none of the variants alters that.
The warning that follows is stated twice, and the second half is the sharper. After my departure, vicious wolves will enter in among you, not sparing the flock — danger from outside, which any shepherd expects. Then: Men will arise from among your own selves, speaking perverse things, to draw away the disciples after them.
That is a prediction about the men in front of him and their successors. The motive named is not doctrinal confusion but a following — to draw away the disciples after them — and the method is to distort what is already believed rather than to import something foreign. Paul does not tell them how to identify such men. He tells them to watch, and reminds them that he spent three years admonishing everyone night and day with tears.
The handing over is done in a single sentence and it is not to a structure. I entrust you to God and to the word of his grace, which is able to build up and to give you the inheritance. Two things are named as sufficient for a church without an apostle: God, and the message about his grace. The elders are given no successor to appeal to.
Then the last section, on money, which reads oddly until one remembers what he is carrying to Jerusalem. I coveted no one's silver, gold, or clothing. You yourselves know that these hands served my necessities. He holds up the hands. A man administering a large collection ends his farewell by pointing at the calluses that prove he never took any of it.
And he closes with a saying of Jesus that appears nowhere in the Gospels: It is more blessed to give than to receive. The church evidently remembered more of his words than were written down, and this one was preserved because a working apostle built his practice on it.
The parting is the least restrained scene in the book. He kneels and prays; they all wept freely, and fell on Paul's neck and kissed him, grieving most at the words about his face. Then they walk him to the ship.
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