Does God still perform miracles?
Question 04113
The question of whether God still performs miracles is one that evangelical Christians answer very differently, and the disagreement tends to generate more heat than light. One position dismisses virtually all claimed miraculous experience as enthusiastic error or deliberate fabrication. Another uses the language of miracles so freely that the word loses the weight the New Testament assigns it. Scripture offers a more careful answer than either extreme, and it is worth working through what that answer actually is before forming a settled opinion.
What a Miracle Is
Before asking whether miracles happen today, clarity about the term is worth establishing. The New Testament uses three overlapping words: semeion (sign), which points beyond itself to a theological reality; teras (wonder), which produces astonishment at the unusual; and dynamis (power or mighty work), which displays divine power in action. A miracle in the full biblical sense is a direct act of God that bypasses the regular processes of creation to accomplish something those processes could not naturally produce.
This distinction matters because not every remarkable providence is a miracle in the technical sense. God works through ordinary means constantly: through medicine, through circumstances, through the decisions of people who do not even know they are serving His purposes. These are genuine expressions of God’s active care for His world, and there is nothing wrong with gratefully acknowledging them as such. But they are distinct from a withered hand restored instantly, sight given to someone born blind from birth, or the dead raised with a word. The category of miracle carries specific weight that is not well served by extending it to every providential coincidence.
Why Cessationism Falls Short of the Evidence
Cessationism holds that miraculous gifts ceased with the completion of the New Testament canon or the death of the apostles, on the grounds that miracles served an authenticating function for the apostolic message, and once that message was confirmed in writing, the authenticating signs were no longer needed. The argument has a certain internal logic, but it runs into significant difficulties with the biblical text.
Philip was not an apostle, yet he performed healings and exorcisms in Samaria (Acts 8:6-7). Stephen was not an apostle, yet he performed “great wonders and signs among the people” (Acts 6:8). The miraculous activity in Acts is not apostolically restricted, which undermines the argument that miracles functioned exclusively to authenticate the Twelve. The primary cessationist proof text, 1 Corinthians 13:10, identifies “the perfect” as the completed canon; but the surrounding context speaks of seeing “face to face” and knowing “even as I have been fully known,” language that Scripture consistently uses of the believer’s direct encounter with God, not of reading a completed set of documents. The text will not carry the interpretive weight being placed upon it.
More significantly, nowhere in the New Testament is there an explicit statement that miraculous gifts would cease before the return of Christ. That is a striking absence when the claim being made is as comprehensive as “God no longer acts miraculously.” If the Spirit had intended to communicate that miraculous activity was temporary, one would reasonably expect some explicit statement in the pastoral epistles, which address practical church life in considerable detail. There is none.
The Living God Who Acts
The God of Scripture is not a deist God who initiated the universe and then stood back to observe it. He is the living God who acts in history, who hears prayer, who intervenes on behalf of His people, and who works through His Spirit in the lives of believers. James 5:14-16 addresses this directly and without qualification: “Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord. And the prayer of faith will save the one who is sick, and the Lord will raise him up.” James is not writing history; he is giving instruction to the ongoing church.
Medical science is a genuine gift from God and should be used with gratitude. But it does not exhaust what God can and does do. Genuine accounts of healings that medicine cannot explain, of conversions attended by direct divine intervention, of protection in circumstances with no natural account, come from credible sources across many contexts and cultures, including contexts far removed from the sensationalist claims of televised healing ministries. Dismissing all of them requires more confidence in one’s position than the available evidence supports.
Expectant Faith Without Credulity
Affirming that God still performs miracles does not require accepting every claimed miracle at face value. Scripture itself calls for discernment. Jesus warned that “false christs and false prophets will arise and perform great signs and wonders, so as to lead astray, if possible, even the elect” (Matthew 24:24). Counterfeit miraculous activity is built into the biblical worldview, which is precisely why 1 John 4:1 instructs believers to test the spirits rather than assume every impressive spiritual experience is from God. The existence of counterfeits does not disprove the genuine; it requires careful evaluation of claims.
The appropriate posture is expectant faith rather than either chronic scepticism or uncritical credulity. God is active. He answers prayer. He heals. He works through His Spirit in ways that exceed the ordinary. None of this happens on demand, and none of it bypasses His own will and timing. But a church that has given up expecting anything from God beyond the management of the ordinary has reduced the living God to something considerably less than Scripture describes.
So, now what?
The question of whether God still does miracles is best answered not in the abstract but in prayer. James 5 is not a historical document describing what first-century churches did; it is an instruction for the church in every generation. Bring illness to God. Ask the elders to pray. Pray with genuine expectation and leave the outcome in God’s hands. The God who heard Elijah is unchanged. Whether He acts miraculously in any particular situation is His decision to make. Whether His people ask with genuine faith is theirs.
“Is anyone among you sick? Let him call for the elders of the church, and let them pray over him, anointing him with oil in the name of the Lord.” James 5:14