In every age, and perhaps more as the world grows older, men's hearts are apt to utter the same wish. The mind, afloat, as it were, on a vast sea, needs, and with reason, a sure anchor. Man cannot tell us of what man has never seen. We crave for the very heaven itself to be opened; we crave to see the light in which God dwells; we crave to hear the voice of Him to whom all things are known, who can neither be deceived nor deceive.
I. This feeling is in its own nature nothing blamable. All belief is not deserving of the name of faith, and it is greatly against the wisdom of God to confound them. If God were to give us no answer at all when we ask for a sign from heaven, no man could be blamed for remaining in uncertainty; on the contrary, to believe a thing merely because we do not like the feeling of ignorance about it is no better than folly. Or again, it might have been possible that God should have given us the very exact answer we desired. But neither of these is our actual case; we are not left in utter ignorance, nor raised to perfect knowledge. There is a state between these two, and that is properly the state of faith. There is no place for faith in entire ignorance; for to believe then were mere idle guessing; it would not be faith, but folly. Nor, again, is there any place for faith in perfect knowledge; for knowledge is something more than believing. The place for faith is between both.
II. That Christ died and rose from the dead is the great work which God has wrought for our satisfaction; it is not absolutely the only sign which He has ever given far from it; but it is the greatest, and goes most directly to that question which we most long to have answered. It assures us of God that He loves us, and will love us for ever. To those who think upon it fully it does become the real sign from heaven which was required; for it brought God into the world, and the world near to God. He who has the evidence of the Spirit not only believes that Christ rose and was seen of Peter and of the other apostles; Christ has manifested Himself to him also; he knows in whom he has believed. The heaven is opened, and the angels of God are every hour ascending and descending on that son of man who, through a living faith in Christ, has been adopted through Him to be a son of God.
T. Arnold, Sermons,vol. v., p. 7.