MATTHEW HENRY (1662-1714 Presbyterian cleric and commentator of Wales).

 

            Though he lived more than three hundred years past, I consider Matthew Henry to be my dear friend and foremost teacher of the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ. My earliest studies of biblical truth were learned at the reading of his scriptural commentary, and his teaching still enlightens my studies of the Word of God to this very day. His writings are timeless and issue from a heart fully dedicated to the Lord Jesus Christ.

            I would encourage every scholar of the Holy Bible to consult the writings of Matthew Henry as a means of gaining spiritual insight into the depth and breadth of God’s Word.

            Below is one of his commentaries concerning Divine Revelation (British spellings retained):

 

Divine revelation is necessary to true religion, to the being and support of it. That faith without which it is impossible to please God, cannot come to any perfection by seeing the works of God, but it must come by hearing the word of God, Rom. x. 17. The rational soul, since it received that fatal shock by the fall, cannot have or maintain that just regard to the great author of its being, that observance of him, and expectation from him, which are both its duty and felicity, without some supernatural discovery made by himself of himself, and of his mind and will. Natural light, no doubt, is of excellent use, as far as it goes; but it is necessary that there be a divine revelation, to rectify its mistakes, and make up its deficiencies, to help us out where the light of nature leaves us quite at a loss, especially in the way and method of man's recovery from his lapsed state, and his restoration to his Maker's favour; which he cannot but be conscious to himself of the loss of, finding, by sad experience, his own present state to be sinful and miserable. 

Our own reason shows us the wound, but nothing short of a divine revelation can discover to us a remedy to be confided in. The case and character of those nations of the earth which had no other guide in their devotions than that of natural light, with some remains of the divine institution of sacrifices received by tradition from their fathers, plainly show how necessary divine revelation is to the subsistence of religion; for those that had not the word of God, soon lost God himself, became vain in their imaginations concerning him, and prodigiously vile and absurd in their worships and divinations. 

It is true, the Jews, who had the benefit of divine revelation, lapsed sometimes into idolatry, and admitted very gross corruptions; yet, with the help of the law and the prophets, they recovered and reformed: whereas the best and most admired philosophy of the heathen could never do any thing toward the cure of the vulgar idolatry, or so much as offered to remove any of those barbarous and ridiculous rites of their religion, which were the scandal and reproach of the human nature. Let men therefore pretend what they will, deists are, or will be, atheists; and those that, under colour of admiring the oracles of reason, set aside as useless the oracles of God, undermine the foundations of all religion, and do what they can to cut off all communication between man and his Maker, and to set that noble creature on a level with the beasts that perish.