Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 3085. The feeding of the five thousand is the only miracle of Jesus, apart from the resurrection itself, recorded in all four Gospels (Matthew 14:13-21; Mark 6:30-44; Luke 9:10-17; John 6:1-15), and that fourfold attestation is itself worth pausing over. Whatever else the early church wanted the world to know about Jesus, this meal…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 3079. Jesus walking on water tends to provoke one of two responses: straightforward acceptance of a miracle performed by the Son of God, or a hunt for some naturalistic explanation that keeps the story while quietly removing the supernatural from it. Was He really treading the surface of the Sea of Galilee in a…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 3062. The other resurrections of the Bible are far less famous than the empty tomb, but they are worth knowing well: nine raisings by my count, spread from the days of Elijah to the ministry of Paul. People genuinely dead were genuinely restored to life, and each account is told with the Bible’s characteristic…
Reading Time: 6 minutesQuestion 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,…
Reading Time: 5 minutesQuestion 4052. The gift of miracles tends to be handled in one of two unhappy ways. Either it is inflated into something sensational, a kind of spiritual circus act, or it is quietly ignored in churches that feel awkward about anything they cannot tidily explain. Neither response does justice to what the New Testament plainly…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60056 Joshua 10:12-14 records one of the most extraordinary events in the entire Old Testament. In the middle of a battle against the Amorite coalition, Joshua commanded the sun to stand still over Gibeon and the moon over the Valley of Aijalon, and Scripture states plainly that “the sun stopped in the midst of…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60064 Reports of miraculous events associated with the Roman Catholic Church have circulated for centuries: weeping statues, Eucharistic miracles where communion wafers are said to turn into human tissue, incorrupt bodies of saints, apparitions of the Virgin Mary, and unexplained healings at sites like Lourdes. For many Catholics, these phenomena confirm their church’s unique…
Reading Time: 4 minutesQuestion 08128 The question of whether demons can perform miracles touches on something that matters deeply for discernment in the life of the church. If the answer is a straightforward no, then the supernatural becomes a reliable indicator of divine activity. If the answer is more nuanced, as Scripture suggests it is, then believers need…
Reading Time: 3 minutesQuestion 60096 The question of whether Jonah was swallowed by a great fish and survived is one that divides those who approach Scripture assuming miracles cannot occur and those who take the text on its own terms. For the reader who accepts that the God who created the ocean and everything in it is capable…
Reading Time: 2 minutesQuestion 60097 Few events in the Old Testament have attracted more attempts at naturalistic explanation than the parting of the waters at the Exodus. Wind setdown models, tsunami hypotheses, and mistranslation theories arguing that Yam Suph means “Sea of Reeds” and therefore refers to a shallow marsh that dried up in a strong wind: these…