The miracles of Scripture were never tricks to win an argument or shows to draw a crowd. They were signs, and a sign is only doing its job when you look where it is pointing.
Miracles in the Bible are acts of God that break into ordinary life to rescue, heal, feed or raise, and each one carries a message about who God is and what His Kingdom does.
In Jesus they reach their clearest form. His signs showed the Father's heart, and at Sound of Heaven we believe God still heals and works miracles today.
We have separate pages on the power of the Holy Spirit, on speaking in tongues and on whether there are prophets today. This one stays with the miracles themselves: what they were, where they happen, what Jesus was showing us through them, and what that means for a church that still prays for the sick.
The point is the wow. The bigger and stranger it is, the better. It proves the person doing it is special, and the crowd goes home talking about the performer.
The point is what it reveals. A hungry crowd is fed, a blind man sees, a widow gets her son back. The people go home talking about God, and the one who was helped goes home whole.
Jesus had no patience for the first kind. When religious leaders demanded a sign on command, He called it the request of “a wicked and adulterous generation” (Matthew 12:39) and pointed them to the sign of Jonah instead.
The New Testament writers keep reaching for three Greek words. Peter uses all three in one breath on the day of Pentecost, when he says Jesus was “accredited by God to you by miracles, wonders and signs” (Acts 2:22). Paul uses the same trio in 2 Corinthians 12:12, and Hebrews 2:4 repeats it.
Power, strength, ability. The same word that means power in general is also used for the act of power itself, which is why older translations often say “mighty works.” It tells you where the miracle comes from.
A sign, mark or token, something by which a thing is recognized. It tells you what the miracle means. John's Gospel prefers this word for Jesus' miracles.
A wonder or portent, something that stops you in your tracks. Thayer's lexicon notes that in the New Testament it appears only in the plural and always joined with signs. Wonder is never allowed to stand on its own.
You can check the lexicon entries for yourself at the Blue Letter Bible entry for semeion. The pattern matters. A miracle has a source, which is the power of God. It has a meaning, which is the sign. And it produces amazement, which is the wonder. Scripture never lets the amazement float free of the meaning.
The wonder gets your attention. The sign tells you what God is saying. If all you walk away with is the wonder, you missed the message.
Read the Bible from start to finish and you notice something. Miracles are not spread evenly across the story. Long stretches go by with very few, and then they come in bursts around specific people at turning points in God's dealings with His people.
Plagues on Egypt, the sea opened, manna each morning. These signs form a nation out of slaves and teach them that God provides. Our study of who Moses was follows that story in full.
Flour and oil that do not run out for a widow in Zarephath. Her son raised. Fire on Carmel. Naaman the Syrian healed in the Jordan. Twenty loaves feeding a hundred men with some left over (2 Kings 4:42 to 44). All of it during an age when Israel was drifting toward Baal.
The densest concentration in the whole Bible. Healings, deliverances, storms stilled, crowds fed, the dead raised. Here the signs stop pointing ahead and start pointing at the one performing them.
A man lame from birth walking at the temple gate, Tabitha raised in Joppa, Paul shaking a viper into the fire on Malta. The same works, now done in Jesus' name by ordinary people carrying the gospel outward.
Each burst sits at a covenant hinge: the founding of Israel, a fight over whether Israel would stay with God at all, the arrival of the King, and the launch of the church through the covenant transition of the first century. That is a fair observation, and the people who argue that miracles have ended lean on it heavily. We will come back to it.
It is also not the whole picture. Gideon's fleece, Hezekiah given fifteen more years, three men walking out of a furnace in Babylon. The clusters are real, but God was never confined to them. This ties into the floating axe head, which is worth reading next.
“But Jesus turned and rebuked them. Then he and his disciples went to another village.”
Luke 9:55 to 56One more thing worth seeing. Not everything in the older stories reflects the Father as Jesus reveals Him. Elijah called fire down on soldiers sent to arrest him (2 Kings 1). When James and John wanted to do the same thing to a Samaritan village, Jesus rebuked them and walked on. Jesus is the clearest picture of God we have, and He used power to heal, never to punish the people in front of Him. We read Elijah through Jesus, not the other way around.
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Manage My Giving"Each of you should give what you have decided in your heart to give, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver."2 Corinthians 9:7
John builds his whole Gospel around a handful of miracles he calls signs. Many readers count seven, from Cana to Lazarus. He tells us plainly why he chose them.
“Jesus performed many other signs in the presence of his disciples, which are not recorded in this book. But these are written that you may believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that by believing you may have life in his name.”
John 20:30 to 31So the question to ask of any miracle of Jesus is simple. What does this show me about Him? When John the Baptist sent from prison asking whether Jesus was the one, Jesus did not send an argument. He sent a list: the blind see, the lame walk, lepers are cleansed, the deaf hear, the dead are raised, and the poor hear good news (Matthew 11:4 to 5). The miracles were the answer. The Kingdom Isaiah described had arrived, and it looked like people being put back together.
His first sign saves a family from shame at a wedding. John says it “revealed his glory” (John 2:11). God's glory, it turns out, looks like generosity at a party.
Thousands fed from one boy's lunch, then Jesus says He is the bread of life. The miracle is the illustration. See our study of the feeding of the 5,000.
Wind and water obey Him, and the disciples ask who this is. Only the Creator talks to the sea like that. More in Jesus calms the storm.
A woman unclean for twelve years touches His cloak. He stops, finds her and calls her daughter. The healing gave her back her body and her place among people. Read the woman with the issue of blood.
A blind beggar shouts over the crowd that is trying to hush him. Jesus stops and asks what he wants. He treats a nobody as someone worth hearing. See blind Bartimaeus.
Jesus weeps at the tomb, then calls a dead man out. He grieves and He wins, in that order. Our page on Lazarus in the Bible walks through it.
Put those together and a picture forms. Jesus used power for people, never against them. He healed the ones others kept at a distance, and He refused to perform on demand. Peter summed it up years later: He “went around doing good and healing” (Acts 10:38).
And every sign leans toward the greatest one. Every healing in the Gospels was a small preview of the resurrection, death itself defeated.
Jesus' miracles were not proof that He had power. They were proof of what kind of God has all the power: one who feeds, heals, restores and raises.
Here is where churches part ways. Some Christians believe miracles and gifts like healing and prophecy belonged to the apostolic era and ended with it. That view has a name, and we give it a fair hearing in our study of cessationism. We think it is wrong.
Miracles and healing are real, and they are active today. At Sound of Heaven we lay hands on the sick and pray, expecting God to move. That is not a fringe add-on to our faith. It is part of following the Jesus of the Gospels.
The cessationist case at its strongest goes like this. Miracles cluster around moments of new revelation, as we saw. Hebrews 2:4 speaks of signs confirming the message to the first generation. Once the message was confirmed and written, the signs had done their job. It is a serious argument, and it rightly guards against a lot of nonsense.
But the clustering shows when miracles were concentrated, not when they were forbidden. Jesus sent more than the Twelve out to heal. He sent the seventy-two as well (Luke 10:9). James tells ordinary churches to call the elders when someone is sick. The powers Hebrews 6:5 calls “the powers of the coming age” belong to the age that arrived with the covenant transition of the first century, and that age did not close. It is the age we live in. The Kingdom is here, and its King has not changed His mind about sick people.
“Is anyone among you sick? Let them call the elders of the church to pray over them and anoint them with oil in the name of the Lord.”
James 5:14The early church did not think the gifts had stopped either. Irenaeus of Lyon, writing near the end of the second century, well after the apostles had died, described believers in his own day who in Jesus' name did works “so as to promote the welfare of other men.” He wrote, “Others still, heal the sick by laying their hands upon them, and they are made whole.” You can read it in Against Heresies, Book 2, chapter 32. Notice his reason. Not to prove a leader special, but for the welfare of other people.
The gifts exist for the good of someone else. Our page on spiritual gifts shows how that works in a local church.
Which Greek word does John's Gospel prefer for Jesus' miracles?
John calls them signs. Cana was “the first of the signs” (John 2:11), and he says the signs were written so that you may believe. John cares less about how impressive a miracle was and more about what it tells you about Jesus.
The first ditch says God does not heal anymore. The second ditch is on our side of the road, and plenty of harm has been done by people who believe in miracles. Here is what we refuse.
Pushing people over, working a crowd with music and volume, announcing healings no one can check. Peter at the temple gate asked the crowd why they stared “as if by our own power or godliness” the man was walking (Acts 3:12). Real signs make the minister smaller, not bigger.
Any teaching that ties a healing to a gift of money is not the gospel. When Simon offered cash for the power to impart the Spirit, Peter told him his money could perish with him (Acts 8:20). Healing was never for sale.
“You were not healed because you did not have enough faith” is one of the cruelest things a church can say, and it usually gets said to the people with the least strength left. A father once told Jesus, “I do believe; help me overcome my unbelief!” (Mark 9:24), and Jesus healed his son anyway.
Someone will point to Nazareth, where Mark says Jesus “could not do any miracles there, except lay his hands on a few sick people and heal them” (Mark 6:5). Read it in context. The problem was a whole town that refused to take Him seriously, not a sick person who failed a faith test, and even there, some were healed. When the disciples asked whether a blind man's condition was his fault or his parents', Jesus said neither (John 9:3). He did not treat sickness as a scorecard.
If you have prayed, and been prayed for, and you are still sick, or the person you love did not recover, please hear this. It is not a verdict on your faith. It is not God keeping score or holding out on you. The New Testament is honest about believers who stayed sick. Paul first preached in Galatia because of an illness (Galatians 4:13). Epaphroditus nearly died (Philippians 2:27). Timothy had frequent illnesses (1 Timothy 5:23). None of them are blamed.
We do not have a tidy answer for why some are healed and some are not, and anyone who offers you one should be handled carefully. What we know is that Jesus wept at a grave He was about to open, and He is not less tender with you. Keep seeing your doctors. Keep asking. Let someone carry it with you. Our team would be honored to pray with you.
A road sign on the Sagtikos is useful for exactly one reason. It tells you where to go. Nobody pulls over to admire it. The miracles in the Bible work the same way. The sea opening, the widow's jar, the wine at Cana, the empty tomb, every one of them is pointing at the same place: a God who comes close to rescue people, fully revealed in Jesus.
That same Jesus reigns now. His Kingdom is here, and we are participants in it, not spectators. So we pray for the sick with real expectation, we give God the glory when healing comes, and we stay beside people when it does not. Both are part of following Him.
For more, read about what the Kingdom of God is, the word dunamis, and what Isaiah meant by by His stripes we are healed. And if you are anywhere near Deer Park, come visit us on a Sunday. We will pray with you.
Miracles in the Bible are signs of God's power pointing to Jesus and His present Kingdom, and the God who worked them still heals today, without hype and without blaming anyone He has not yet healed.
Whether you need healing in your body, your mind or your home, send us a note and someone at Sound of Heaven will pray with you by name.
Miracles in the Bible were signs. Each one showed something true about God: that He rescues, provides, heals and gives life. In the Old Testament they freed Israel from Egypt and called the nation back to God in Elijah's day. In Jesus they reached their clearest form. John says he recorded Jesus' signs so that readers would believe He is the Messiah and have life in His name. A miracle was never meant to make a person famous. It was meant to point people to God.
The Gospels describe a few dozen specific miracles, including healings, deliverances, nature miracles and three people raised from the dead. But the writers are clear that this is only a sample. Many summaries say He healed everyone who was brought to Him in a town, and John says Jesus did many other signs that are not written down (John 20:30). If every one were recorded, John adds, the world could not hold the books. The number matters less than what the signs revealed about Him.
Yes. At Sound of Heaven we believe miracles and healing are real and active today. Jesus sent His followers out to heal, James tells ordinary churches to have the elders pray for the sick, and early Christians like Irenaeus described healings in their own day, long after the apostles. The Kingdom Jesus brought is present now, and He has not changed. We also stay honest: some claimed miracles are exaggerated, and no one should ever be manipulated or charged for prayer.
We do not fully know, and it is better to say so than to invent an answer. What Scripture makes clear is that it is not a verdict on the sick person's faith. Paul preached in Galatia because of an illness, Timothy had frequent illnesses, and Epaphroditus nearly died, and none of them are blamed. Jesus even healed a boy whose father admitted his faith was mixed. So we keep praying, keep seeing doctors, and keep loving people through whatever happens.
They are three angles on the same event. In Acts 2:22 Peter uses three Greek words together. Dynamis means power and points to the source of the miracle, which is God. Semeion means sign and points to its meaning, what God is saying through it. Teras means wonder, the amazement it produces, and in the New Testament it always appears alongside signs. John's Gospel prefers the word sign, because the question that matters is what the miracle shows you about Jesus.