Miracles - Part 3

"Prove all things; hold fast that which is good." [I Thes. 5:21]

Comparison
So now the question becomes, do miracles still occur today?  In the first part of this series I made the argument that the purpose of miracles was to show with what authority the act was being done (God).  In the second part I argued that miracles were only necessary until the Word of God was completed, which happed about 1900 years ago.  But there still appear to be those performing and witnessing miracles today, so let's examine some of those and compare them to Biblical miracles.

Consider some of the more memorable miracles recorded in scripture.  Jesus, Paul, and others raised people from the dead.  Elijah called on God to rain down fire from heaven.  Thousands spoke in tongues on the day of Pentecost.  Moses parted the Red Sea so that hundreds of thousands, or even millions of Jews crossed on dry land.  These were miracles that nobody could deny.  Even the enemies of Christ couldn't deny the acts that He did, so instead they tried to accuse Him of getting His power from Satan.  These things were also instantaneous. Moses didn't pray for six months until the sea dried up.  Elijah didn't dance around his altar all day like the prophets of Baal did.  Jesus didn't spend days making Lazarus "feel better".  They performed the act, and the results were immediate and undeniable.

Now consider the miracles observed today.  Just do a quick Google search of faith healers and you'll see that they've pretty much all been exposed.  But let's assume for a second that they haven't.  You have a woman walk up on stage claiming to have cancer.  The man slaps her on the forehead, declares her cancer gone, and she leaves, and we have only his word that she's healed.  Does that sound like the miracles we read in the Bible?  What about some others?  People have told me about dates changing on forms so that they have time to make their payments, or getting lost and "miraculously" ending up at their destination.  How about images of a man with long hair and a beard which somewhat resembles portraits of Jesus painted by European artists appearing on the side of a wall?  Do any of these sound like the miracles performed in Biblical times??  These can all be explained away as hoaxes, intuition, chance, or mistakes, and none can be proven to anywhere near the same level of confidence as those recorded in Scripture.  And none, save the exposed faith healing, satisfies the purpose of miracles explained earlier.  How does finding your way to the airport have anything to do with revealing the power of God?

This has gotten slightly longer than most of my posts, so I'll wrap it up here.  But hopefully I've made the point that modern day "miracles" don't hold a candle to those recorded in Scripture, not because we just don't have enough faith today, but because the miracles we see today are not in fact miracles.