Whereunto I am ordained a preacher, and an apostle... — Whereunto, or “for which witness.” To announce which witness — the witness being the suffering and the death of Christ — St. Paul was ordained an Apostle — the reference being entirely to what preceded.
I speak the truth... and lie not. — The warmth with which St. Paul here asserted his divinely conferred commission as preacher and Apostle, was not called out by any desire on his part to seize an occasion of asserting in the presence of his enemies, the false heretical teachers of Ephesus, his especial rank and prerogatives as an Apostle chosen and commissioned by the Most High. These fiery and earnest words had no private reference to him, St. Paul, or to his especial claims to be heard, but were uttered solely in view of the surpassing magnitude of the message with which he was charged — solely to bear a weighty and imposing testimony to the truth of his assertion, which so many were ready and eager to dispute — the assertion that the gospel of Jesus Christ was a message of glad tidings, was an offer of salvation, not to a people, but to a world.
A teacher of the Gentiles. — This specifies more clearly the especial duties of his apostleship, not perhaps without some reference to the peculiar fitness which marked him out as the declarer of the divine will in respect to this gracious offer of redemption to the isles of the scattered countless Gentiles.
In faith and verity. — Better rendered, in faith and truth. These words specify the sphere in which the Apostle performed his great mission. The first, “in faith,” refers to St. Paul’s own personal faith in Jesus — the grand motive power of his life and work; the second, “in truth,” refers to the truth of Christianity — to the well-known facts of the gospel story. Or, in other words, St. Paul carried on his ceaseless labours, within gathering fresh and ever fresh strength from the exhaustless spring of his own loving, mighty faith in Jesus, and without appealing to the generally well-known incidents of the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus, the truth of which all might test. In those days there were even many eye-witnesses of the Passion still living.