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1. There are some men whose affections are stronger than their understandings: they feel more than they think. They are perhaps the happiest class of minds: for it is happy to be without misgivings about the love of God and our own eternal rest in Him. "Blessed are they that have believed."

2. There is another class whose reflective powers are stronger than their susceptive: they think out truth — they do not feel it out. Such a man was Thomas. Happy such men cannot be. An anxious and inquiring mind dooms its possessor to unrest. But manly and affectionate they may be: Thomas was. "Let us go up too, that we may die with Him." And men of mighty faith they may become: Thomas did. Now this question of a resurrection which made Thomas restless is the most anxious that can agitate the mind of man. So awful in its importance, and out of Christ so desperately dark in its uncertainty, who shall blame an earnest man severely if he crave the most indisputable proofs? Very clearly Christ did not. Thomas asked of Christ a sign. His Master gave him that sign, with a gentle and delicate reproof it is true — but He did give it. Note —

I. THE NATURALNESS OF THE DOUBTS OF THOMAS, which partly excuses them.

1. Nature is silent respecting a future life. There is enough to show us that there may be a life to come; there is nothing to make it certain. You strain at something in the twilight, and just when you are beginning to make it out the light fails you. So when we strain into nature's mysteries, to discern the secrets of the Great Hereafter. There are probabilities, nothing more.

2. Let us examine some of them.

(1) The wish for immortality is a kind of argument: it is not likely that God would have given man such a feeling, if He had not meant to gratify it. If we thirst, God has created liquids. If we are susceptible of attachments, there are beings to gratify love. If we thirst for life and love eternal, it is likely that there are an eternal life and love. But more we cannot say.

(2) The traditions of universal belief. How came it to be held by all, if only a delusion? And yet when you come to estimate this it is only a presumption. The universal voice of mankind is not infallible.

(3) We are met by many resemblances to a resurrection — that of the moth from the grave of the chrysalis. For many ages the sculptured butterfly was the type and emblem of immortality. Again, there is a kind of resurrection when the spring brings vigour and motion back to the frozen pulse of the winter world. And yet all this, valuable as it is in the way of suggestiveness, is worth nothing in the way of proof. They only look like resurrections. The chrysalis only seemed dead: the tree in winter only seemed to have lost its vitality. Six thousand years of human existence have passed away; countless armies of the dead have set sail from the shores of time. No traveller has returned from the still land beyond. Now look at all this without Christ, and tell us whether it be possible to escape such misgivings as these which rise out of such an aspect of things. I do not wonder that Thomas, with that honest, accurate mind of his, wishing that the news were true, yet dreading lest it should be false, and determined to guard against every possible illusion, said so strongly, "Except I shall see," &c.

II. THE CHRISTIAN PROOFS OF A RESURRECTION. This text tells us of two kinds of proof:

1. The evidence of the senses — "Because thou hast seen Me, thou hast believed." This external evidence of Christ's resurrection is twofold. The witness of Thomas, who was satisfied with the proofs, and of John, who records the circumstance.

(1) Try the witness by ordinary rules. John does not say that he had heard the story from Thomas, and that years afterwards he had penned it down when his memory might be failing. He was present the whole time. All the apostles were there: they all watched the result with eager interest. Now, a scene like that is one of those solemn ones in a man's life which cannot be forgotten. Estimate next the worth of the witness of Thomas. Evidence is worth little if it is the evidence of credulity. But here was a man who dreaded the possibility of delusion, however credulous the others might be. He resolved beforehand that only one proof should be decisive. The evidence of testimony which he did reject was very strong, but he held out against it. He would trust a thing so infinitely important to nothing but his own scrutinizing hand.

(2) Try the evidence next by character. Blemished character damages evidence. Now, the only charge that was ever heard against John was that he loved a world which hated him. The character of Thomas is that he was a man cautious in receiving evidence, and most rigorous in exacting proof, but ready to act upon his convictions when once made, even to the death. Who impeaches that testimony?

(3) Once more — any possibility of interested motives will discredit evidence. Ask we the motive of John or Thomas for this strange tale? John's reward — a long and solitary banishment to the mines of Patmos. The gain and the bribe which tempted Thomas — a lonely pilgrimage to the far East, and death at the last in India;

(a) The evidence to which Thomas yielded was the evidence of the senses. Now, the feeling which arose from this Christ pronounced to be faith — "Thou hast seen, thou hast believed." Observe then, it matters not how faith comes — whether through the intellect, as with Thomas — or through the heart, as with John; but faith is a state of soul in which the things of God become glorious certainties. It was not faith which assured Thomas that Christ stood before him: that was sight. But it was faith which from the visible enabled him to pierce up to the truth invisible: "My Lord and my God"; and which enabled him ever after to venture everything on that conviction, and live for One who had died for him.

(b) The faith of Thomas was not merely satisfaction about a fact: it was trust in a Person. The admission of a fact, however sublime, is not faith: we may believe that Christ is risen, yet not be nearer heaven. Thomas passed on from the fact of the resurrection to the Person of the risen — "My Lord and my God." Trust in the risen Saviour — that was the belief which saved his soul. And that is our salvation too.

2. The evidence of the Spirit — "Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed." There are thousands of Christians who have never examined the evidences of the Resurrection: they are incapable of estimating it if they did examine; they have never seen — they know nothing of proofs and miracles — yet they believe and are blessed. How is this? I reply, there is an inward state of heart which makes truth credible the moment it is stated. Love is credible to a loving heart; purity to a pure mind. Of course that inward state could not reveal a fact like the Resurrection; but it can receive the fact the moment it is revealed without requiring evidence. The love of St. John himself never could discover a resurrection; but it made a resurrection easily believed, when the man of intellect, St. Thomas, found difficulties. Therefore "with the heart man believeth unto righteousness," and therefore "he that believeth on the Son of God hath the witness in himself." Now it is of such a state that Jesus speaks. There are men in whom the resurrection begun makes the resurrection credible. In them the Spirit of the risen Saviour works already. They have risen out of the darkness of doubt, above the narrowness of life, above fear, above self; being "risen with Christ:" and the man in whom all that is working has got something more blessed than external evidence to rest upon. The Resurrection in all its heavenliness has begun within his soul, and he knows as clearly as if he had demonstration, that it must be developed in an eternal life. Now this is the higher and nobler kind of faith.

(F. W. Robertson, M. A.)

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KJV: But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, was not with them when Jesus came.

WEB: But Thomas, one of the twelve, called Didymus, wasn't with them when Jesus came.