Acts 20:28

Take heed unto yourselves, and to all the flock, in which the Holy Spirit hath made you bishops, to feed the church of the Lord which he purchased with his own blood.

The Holy Spirit hath made you bishops ... For the use of the title "bishop" as applied to elders, and the seven titles given this office in the New Testament, see under Acts 14:23, above. How had the Holy Spirit made those men bishops? The Spirit had given the qualifications for men to meet in order to qualify for the office and had commanded that they should be appointed.

Church of the Lord which he purchased with his own blood ... No verse in the New Testament, nor any other statement that could be imagined, could possibly exceed the power of this in declaring the eternal importance and necessity of the church Christ established. Here the heretical notion of salvation "by faith alone" is shattered and countermanded forever. By any definition, salvation by "faith alone" means salvation without the church of Jesus Christ; and in such a view the crucifixion of our Lord is reduced to the status of a senseless murder. If men are saved, in any sense by the blood of Jesus, they must be saved through the church of which that blood is here declared to be the purchase price.

If one person can be saved without the church, then all men may be so saved; and such a proposition is emphatically contradicted and denied by Paul's words here.

The Lord ... as translated here is from the Greek word "God," and should be so rendered. This is one of ten New Testament references to Jesus as "God," and no matter how offensive this may be to human ears, the plain truth is that the sacred text here is unassailable. No critic may intelligently deny that what is written here is: "The church of God, which he purchased with his own blood." See my Commentary on Hebrews, Hebrews 1:81 for list of New Testament Scriptures and comment on Christ "as God." In addition to those, it may also be recalled that the apostle John referred to Christ as "the only begotten God" (John 1:18). Both the Johannine reference and the passage here, however, have been mistranslated deliberately by the scholars. The purpose of such unusual declarations in the New Testament is evidently that of affirming unequivocally the godhead and deity of Jesus Christ.