Miracles

A miracle, in biblical usage, is an act or event attributed directly to God that evokes wonder and serves as a sign of who God is and what he is doing. Scripture does not use one word for it: historically, the Hebrew terms usually rendered this way are ot (“sign”) and mopet (“wonder”), alongside niphlaot (“wonderful deeds”), and the Greek New Testament uses semeion (“sign”), teras (“wonder”), and dynamis (“act of power”). These overlap without being identical — a sign points, a wonder astonishes, a work of power accomplishes — and the single English word flattens the distinction.

The text consistently ties the miraculous to God’s own arrival to save. Isaiah 35:4 commands the fearful to take heart because “Behold, your God will come with vengeance, God’s retribution. He will come and save you,” and the healing that follows — “Then the lame man will leap like a deer, and the tongue of the mute will sing” (Isaiah 35:6) — is pictured as wilderness breaking into streams. Joel 2:28 sets the outpouring of the Spirit, with prophecy, dreams, and visions, in the same register of God acting decisively. The New Testament reads Jesus in these terms: Matthew 1:23 applies the child’s name Immanuel, “God with us,” and John 11:25–26 records Jesus saying, “I am the resurrection and the life. He who believes in me will still live, even if he dies.” Read this way, the central miracle is not an isolated wonder but God present with his people.

Scripture also joins miracle to faith and prayer, though without offering a technique. Matthew 21:22 says, “All things, whatever you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive,” and Mark 11:24 tells the disciple to “believe that you have received them.” Interpreters have disagreed sharply over the scope of such promises — whether they are unqualified, whether they presuppose alignment with God’s will, and how they square with unanswered prayer — and the text does not settle the matter at this point. Jesus’ words in Matthew 12:34–35, that “out of the abundance of the heart, the mouth speaks,” place human speech and action under the heart’s condition, while 2 Thessalonians 2:12 speaks of judgment on those who “didn’t believe the truth,” treating belief and unbelief as morally serious rather than neutral. One way to read this is that the Bible is wary of wonder detached from trust.

Christian traditions differ here, and the differences are interpretive rather than incidental. Cessationist traditions hold that the sign-working gifts belonged to the apostolic founding period and are not normative now; continuationist and charismatic traditions hold that the outpouring promised in Joel 2:28 continues, and expect healings, prophecy, and other signs in the present. Sacramental traditions locate God’s saving action chiefly in ordinary means of grace — water, bread and wine — read as signs rather than spectacle, and much modern theology defines miracle as a sign-event rather than a suspension of natural law, a reading that sits easily with Exodus 19:5, where God says “all the earth is mine,” grounding his freedom over what he has made. None of these positions is spelled out as such in Scripture; each is a construal of it.

AI-generated reference entry, grounded in the passages where this term appears — history and Scripture stated as such, interpretation labeled as interpretation. Not a substitute for the text itself.