There is a lot of controversy about miracles. This is based on some fundamental misunderstandings of what they are and what they are intended to accomplish.
A miracle is what happens when God intervenes directly in His creation. It often involves completely ordinary things that just happen to fall together neatly, as though by a plan. I got a job offer on the 15th of August and accepted it. It was a better job with better pay. On the last day of my employment at my old job, everybody in my section was told they needed to find another job – that the section was shutting down. I left a job on Friday that was going away and started my new job on Monday. Was it a miracle? I think so. God provided for my needs. He lined up things perfectly. Whether it was a miracle or coincidence is a matter of interpretation. Other kinds of miracles are more clear.
A woman lay dying of bone cancer. The treatments weren’t working. A man of faith prayed with her. A year later, she was hiking in the woods, completely cancer-free.
Do you have an open mind?
Most people who say they have an open mind actually do not. They refuse to believe things they don’t immediately understand. And that is the key: they refuse to believe what is staring them in the face.
There is a philosophical position that there can’t be enough evidence for a miracle – that there must be a natural explanation for everything that happens. This is not a position that can be reached by logic. It can’t be reached in any way at all – you have to start there. There is no logical basis for excluding all evidence that supports something you don’t understand. It is a statement that is as unprovable as the statement that God doesn’t exist. It is a metaphysical assertion rather than a scientific one. That means that it is a statement about what is true about the supernatural rather than about nature. People who hold that position fool themselves into thinking they are being rational and logical – they are being the opposite of rational and logical. A rational and logical person will adjust his assumptions with the addition of new evidence. These people adjust or exclude evidence based on their assumptions.
It is not the same kind of statement as when a Christian says that God exists. The Christian is usually basing his assertion on sound reasoning and personal experience. Rather, it is the unreasoning assertion of a child who says that anything green is yucky, so refuses to try the mint ice cream.
This is what the Bible means when it says that people suppress the evidence.
Romans 1:18-20
The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God’s invisible qualities, His eternal power and divine nature, have been clearly seen, being understood from His workmanship, so that men are without excuse.
Wickedness here means unrighteousness, injustice and wrongfulness against God. Think of it as rebellion. People refuse to accept what God does because they don’t want to. It would mean that they are not in charge, not free agents – not in control of their own lives.
The Bible is full of miracles. Remember that the Bible is not a single book. It is a collection of ancient documents bundled up together. When looking at ancient documents, the author is assumed to be truthful unless he has shown himself to be untruthful. The historical narratives of the Bible are generally accepted to be true by religious and secular scholars, but the secular scholars summarily reject the descriptions of miracles in the same narratives they assume to be truthful in all other respects. It is suppression of evidence. It is arrogant presumption (I know better than the person that wrote the work).
The miracles in the Bible are not fanciful stories. Literary analysis doesn’t support that (among other things, the style is wrong). They are what they claim to be – eyewitness accounts of events. If you look at them as such, you will see that they are plausible, consistent and better explain the events than any alternative explanation.
Unless you start with a metaphysical assumption that there is no God and that miracles can’t happen, there is nothing inherently implausible about a creator intervening in His creation to perform specific tasks.
Several common objections to miracles are examined in Arguments and Rebuttals, along with their rebuttals.
The Old Testament
Miracles have a long and august history. The Bible is full of miracles. In the Old Testament, God used miracles to save His people, provide for His people or prove to His people that a prophet comes from Him. There are more than 90 miracles in the Old Testament.
God saved His people through miracles. Obvious examples include the plagues God inflicted on Egypt to force them to release the Israelites.
Exodus 9:13-15
Then the Lord said to Moses, “Get up early in the morning, stand before Pharaoh and tell him, ‘This is what the Lord, the God of the Hebrews, says: Let my people go, so that they may worship me. Otherwise, I will send all my plagues against you and your officials and your people, so you may know that there is no one like me in all the earth. For by now I could have stretched out my hand and struck you and your people with a plague to wipe you off the earth.
He helped them leave, destroyed Pharaoh’s army and provided them food and water in the desert.
God provided food for a widow and her son when Elijah was staying with them during a famine.
1 Kings 17:15-16
She went away and did as Elijah had told her. So there was food every day for Elijah and for the woman and her family. For the jar of flour was not used up and the jug of oil did not run dry, in keeping with the word of the Lord spoken by Elijah.
Jonah tried to flee from the task God wanted him to perform, but God had him thrown overboard and taken to his destination in the belly of a great fish. (See the Book of Jonah). This was widely thought to be fanciful fiction until the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Several sailors were rescued from the bellies of whales. They had been swallowed, but hadn’t immediately died. They were rescued by their fellow whalers. Just because we haven’t seen it or don’t understand it doesn’t mean it can’t happen.
Often, God used miracles to prove that prophets came from Him. One of the marks of a prophet was an authenticating miracle. Not all Old Testament prophets were authenticated in this way. Some just wrote things down that later came to pass.
Old Testament miracles range from providing food and water to bringing rain to calling down hailstones on an enemy army to stopping the sun. They are not few, and not small. They are solid evidence of a strong and powerful God intervening in His creation for His own purposes.
The New Testament
In the New Testament, Jesus used miracles to prove who He was. He also used miracles to care for those around Him. The overwhelming majority of His miracles were miracles of healing. Some were to teach specific lessons.
The first miracle Jesus performed was at a wedding party. Jesus was one of the guests. When the hosts ran out of wine, He transformed several large jars of water into very good wine. This caused His disciples to believe He was who He said He was. (John 2:1-12).
Jesus healed many people, including:
The man born blind (John 9:1-7)
Ten lepers (Luke 17:11-19)
A royal official’s son (John 4:46-54)
A centurion’s servant (Matthew 8:5-13 and Luke 7:2-10)
He resurrected Lazarus after he was dead for three days. (John 11:38-44)
Jesus did other things as well:
He walked on water (Matthew 14:24 – 27, Mark 6:47 – 50, John 6:18 – 21)
He put a coin to pay the tax in a fish (Matthew 17:24-27)
He cast out demons (Matthew 8:28, Mark 5:1, Luke 8:26)
He fed four thousand men (plus their families) (Matthew 15:32-38 and Mark 8:1-9)
He stilled a violent storm (Matthew 8:23 – 27, Mark 4:35 – 41, Luke 8:22 – 25)
All told, Jesus performed 37 miracles, not including rising from the dead.
Other people in the New Testament also performed miracles. The Apostles miraculously healed many people and cast out demons in Jesus’ name. Most of the miracles in the new Testament performed by people other than Jesus were played down. The authors attested to them, but gave the glory to God rather than themselves.
When considered as historical documents, the books of the Bible that describe miracles have been found to be sober accounts by reasonable and honest eyewitnesses. People have been trying to discredit the miracles in the Bible for two thousand years and have failed.
There is actually a lot of evidence for miracles that is just as compelling as the evidence for anything else. People just refuse to believe them.
As Christians, we need to accept the Biblical account. This does not mean checking your brain at the door. Investigate the accounts – determine for yourself that they are true. There are several good books by people who investigated the claims of the Bible with the explicit aim of disproving them, only to find that they cannot be disproved, causing the authors to submit to Jesus.
We need to be a little skeptical of people who claim to have seen miracles, because people make claims for all sorts of reasons. There is, however, no reason to think that God stopped intervening in His creation with the death of the Apostles. There have been many, many accounts of miracles throughout history. Most are little-known though, because historians have suppressed them as fanciful.
We should expect miracles to occur today, but not dwell on the possibility. God intervenes for His own reasons and in His own time. Mostly, He seems to want us to follow Him and do what He wants by our own strength (as augmented by Him, of course) because He wants us to grow. Children who get everything given to them don’t ever amount to much.
If someone claims a miracle, find out how it glorifies God. If it glorifies God, reinforces someone’s faith or honors someone’s obedience, it is likely genuine. If it points to people or things other than God, it is likely coincidence or fabrication.
Prayer is not a magic wand that we can wave to make miracles happen. Preachers who state otherwise are not preaching the word of God. We cannot manipulate God into doing things for us. Special kinds of prayers do not guarantee results. We are in a relationship with someone who is unimaginably powerful, who loves us and likes to help His people. As broken humans, we yearn for the spectacular. When we ask Him for help, sometimes He does something spectacular, but more often He moves quietly, behind the scenes.