Does God Still Do Miracles Today?

Question 04113.

Whether God still does miracles today is a question I get asked more often than almost any other, usually by someone who has either just watched a television healing programme with deep suspicion or just heard a testimony from a friend that they cannot quite explain away. My answer is a careful yes, and the word careful is doing real work in that sentence, because Scripture gives us both the grounds for expecting the miraculous and the tools for testing every claim that comes our way.

I want to be honest that this is a question where good, Bible-believing Christians land in different places. I hold what is usually called a continuationist position, meaning I do not believe the miraculous gifts of the Spirit ceased with the apostolic age, but I hold it cautiously, because the charismatic world has produced plenty over the last century that deserves scrutiny rather than applause. Working out whether God still performs miracles today means being honest about both sides of that coin.

What Scripture Means by Miracles Today

A miracle in the biblical sense is not simply an unusual coincidence or a happy answer to prayer, welcome as those are. Scripture uses words like semeion (sign), teras (wonder) and dunamis (act of power) to describe events in which God acts directly and perceptibly beyond the ordinary course of nature, in a way that points people toward who He is. Jesus turning water into wine at Cana (John 2:1-11) is called the first of His signs precisely because it revealed His glory and produced faith in His disciples, not just because it was unusual.

This distinction matters because it keeps us from a sloppy use of the word. Finding a parking space after praying is a kindness of God’s providence, not a miracle in the technical sense. Reserving the word miracle for what Scripture reserves it for protects the category from being cheapened, and it also protects us from either demanding the spectacular on command or dismissing the genuinely supernatural because we have quietly redefined it out of existence. When people ask whether God still does miracles today, much of the disagreement actually turns on what each side means by the word.

Miracles in the Old and New Testaments

The Bible does not present miracles as a constant, evenly spread feature of every era of redemptive history. They cluster at particular hinge points: the exodus and the giving of the law through Moses, the ministries of Elijah and Elisha confronting Baal worship in a compromised Israel, and then the ministry of Jesus and the apostolic founding of the church recorded in Acts. Each cluster accompanies a fresh stage of God’s revealed word and purpose, authenticating the messenger and the message together, as the writer to the Hebrews notes when he describes the gospel being attested by signs and wonders and various miracles (Hebrews 2:3-4).

That clustering pattern is worth noticing, because it tells us miracles were never meant to function as constant background wallpaper. They served a specific purpose tied to fresh revelation. It does not follow, however, that the purpose has now permanently expired, since the New Testament nowhere announces a closing date for the miraculous the way it announces the closing of the canon of Scripture itself. The absence of a stated end point is a genuine argument, even if it is an argument from silence, and I think it deserves more weight than cessationists usually give it.

Why Some Christians Say the Miraculous Has Ceased

Cessationists, drawing especially on B. B. Warfield’s influential nineteenth century argument, hold that miracles and the sign gifts were given specifically to authenticate the apostles and the writing of the New Testament, and that once that foundation was laid (Ephesians 2:20) the need for such confirming signs fell away. Some appeal to 1 Corinthians 13:10, where Paul says that when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away, and argue that ‘the perfect’ refers to the completed canon of Scripture rather than to Christ’s return.

I take this argument seriously because good, careful people hold it, and I do not think cessationists are being unfaithful to Scripture when they reach this conclusion. But I do not find it persuasive, mainly because of what comes immediately around that one contested verse, and because the broader pattern of the New Testament simply does not read like a document winding down the miraculous in preparation for its own completion.

Why I Do Not Follow the Cessationist Argument

Read 1 Corinthians 13:12 alongside verse 10 and the language is unmistakably about seeing Christ face to face and knowing fully even as we are fully known. That is resurrection language, not library-shelf language. A completed New Testament, wonderful gift that it is, does not give any believer exhaustive knowledge or face-to-face sight of the Lord. Paul is describing the return of Christ, not the closing of the canon, and I think the text has to be bent quite hard to make it say otherwise.

Nor does the New Testament ever say the gifts listed in Romans 12, 1 Corinthians 12 and Ephesians 4 were temporary scaffolding for a single generation. Paul instructs the Corinthian church, and by extension every church that reads his letter down through history, to earnestly desire the spiritual gifts (1 Corinthians 14:1), with no expiry clause attached anywhere in the text. I would rather hold a gift lightly and use it carefully than assume Scripture retired something it never actually said it was retiring.

Providence, Answered Prayer and the Miraculous: Telling Them Apart

Not everything wonderful that happens is a miracle in the strict sense, and learning to tell the difference protects both our worship and our discernment. God heals through medicine and the body’s ordinary recovery far more often than He heals by direct intervention, and both are gracious, both are genuine answers to prayer, and only one of them properly earns the word miracle. Confusing the categories either inflates our expectations unhelpfully, or, just as damagingly, blinds us to the rarer occasions when God really has done something that ordinary medicine simply cannot explain.

I have sat with people who recovered against every medical expectation and people who died despite the fervent, faith-filled prayer of an entire congregation, and I do not believe the difference between those two outcomes is a verdict on anyone’s faith. God’s ways in this area remain, frankly, mysterious, and I would rather hold that tension honestly than force a tidy explanation onto every single case that comes my way as a pastor.

Guarding Against Both Extremes

The danger on one side is a practical deism that has quietly written God out of His own world, treating every scientific explanation as though it excluded divine action rather than describing the ordinary means He uses. The danger on the other side is a market of manufactured miracles, where healing claims go unverified, financial appeals ride on emotional testimonies, and the platform personality gets more attention than the Lord Jesus who alone deserves the glory (John 5:44). Both errors, in their own way, distort the question of whether God still does miracles today.

My own rule of thumb, worked out over years of pastoral ministry, is to test every claim against Scripture first, ask whether Christ is exalted or a personality is exalted, and be deeply wary of anything that comes with a financial appeal attached to the promise of a miracle. Dunamis, the New Testament’s ordinary word for miraculous power, is never once sold in the pages of Scripture, and any ministry that trades on it should be met with real suspicion rather than an open wallet.

Testing a Miracle Claim in Practice

When someone tells me they have witnessed or experienced a miracle, I ask a handful of simple questions before I form a judgement. Does the claimed event actually go beyond what medicine, coincidence or ordinary providence can explain, or has the word miracle simply been attached to something perfectly natural because it felt significant? Does the account point people toward Christ and sound doctrine, or toward the reputation of the person who performed it? Is there any pressure, financial or emotional, attached to belief in the claim? None of these questions can settle every case with total certainty, but together they filter out a great deal of the noise that surrounds this whole subject, and they let genuinely biblical instances of God’s miraculous work stand out more clearly.

Teaching a Congregation to Think Well About This

I have found it worth teaching a whole congregation, not just individuals who ask me privately, how to think about whether God still does miracles today. Left untaught, a church tends to drift toward one of two unhelpful defaults: either a quiet embarrassment about the miraculous that borders on practical unbelief, or an appetite for the spectacular that makes people easy targets for exactly the kind of manufactured claims Scripture warns us against. A congregation that has thought carefully about miracles today, together, in the light of Scripture, is far less likely to be swept along by either extreme when a dramatic claim eventually reaches them.

I would rather my own church be a community that prays boldly for the sick, expects God to act, and tests every report of miracles today against His Word with equal seriousness, than one that has settled for either uncritical excitement or a tidy, practical deism dressed up as theological caution.

So, now what?

So does God still do miracles today? I believe He does, though I hold that conviction with open hands rather than a checklist of expectations. He is not a vending machine, and He is not obliged to repeat Cana or the feeding of the five thousand on request. What He has promised is His presence, His sufficiency, and His purposes worked out for the good of those who love Him, whether that comes through the extraordinary or, far more often, through the daily and the ordinary means He has always used. Keep your eyes on Christ rather than the spectacle, test every claim of miracles today against His own Word, and you will not go far wrong.

“Now there are varieties of gifts, but the same Spirit; and there are varieties of service, but the same Lord; and there are varieties of activities, but it is the same God who empowers them all in everyone.”

1 Corinthians 12:4-6 (ESV)