Revelation Deep Dive: Revelation 16:15, A Warning to Stay Ready

Two New Books, and Where This Is Going

I want to tell you about something I have been building quietly for months.

If you have read Revelation Explained, you know my conviction about the Bible's last book: it was not written to baffle you, and its symbols make sense when you trace them back to their roots. Somewhere in that work I kept running into a Victorian bishop who had been making the same argument, about the whole Bible, a century and a half earlier.

J.C. Ryle published Expository Thoughts on the Gospels in 1856. He wrote for farmers reading by candlelight and for families at the dinner table, and he said his aim was writing plain enough for a child to follow and solid enough that a scholar could not dismiss it. Spurgeon called him the best man in the Church of England. His books have never gone out of print.

The trouble is the language. Not Ryle's thinking, which is as clear as anything written since, but the 1856 packaging: the thees and thous of the King James passages he quotes, and a thin layer of Victorian vocabulary in his own prose.

So I have published two books.

Expository Thoughts on the Gospel of Matthew (Annotated) is Ryle's commentary with those two barriers removed and nothing else touched. The archaic language is gently updated, and every single change was logged and checked against the original printing. His sentences, his rhythm, and his theology stand exactly as he wrote them. It adds a new foreword explaining the method and a fully documented biography of the man, which is a remarkable story most readers have never heard.

The Gospel of Matthew: A 28-Week Study Workbook takes the same Gospel one chapter a week, with room to write. Each week you read the chapter, name what it teaches, warns, and comforts, work through honest questions, and choose one thing to actually do. It works for small groups, for solo readers, and for families, with a fifteen-minute plan in every chapter for reading Matthew around the table with children. That last part restores exactly what Ryle designed these readings for in the first place.

Both are available now as eBook and Paperback:

The commentary: Get the commentary

The workbook: Get the workbook

Where This Is Going

Matthew is the first of four.

Mark and Luke are both close to finished. John will follow in 2027, which completes all four Gospels, each with a modernized commentary and a matching study workbook.

The reason is simple. The Christian who studies the end of the story should know the beginning just as well. The King who returns in Revelation 19 first arrived in Matthew 1. Ryle spent his life making both arrivals plain to ordinary readers, and that is a project worth finishing.

More soon.