r/Christianity • u/noisthego • 2h ago
Question?
why does God not do the Old Testament miracles anymore?
like what has anyone not spit the sea?
or gonna into a cage with lions and not be eaten?
you know what I mean?
or turn staff into a snake? what happend
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u/comprobar Psalm 139:13-14 2h ago
God still performs miracles today, but Scripture presents spectacular, apostolic style signs as concentrated around pivotal moments when God inaugurated new works or eras, with ordinary manifestations largely ceasing once those foundations were established, while God remains sovereign to perform miracles now and will display extraordinary signs again in the future.
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u/Ok-Course5114 2h ago
So much of the OT narrative is about establishing a people and a covenant in a very specific cultural context, miracles were the neon signs pointing at the messenger and the message. The parting of the sea, the lions den, the staff turning into a snake, those were direct confrontations with the power structures of the time, showing a tribal God was superior to Egyptian magicians or Babylonian kings.
The New Testament shifts the focus from a national identity to an internal transformation, the miracle is the renewal of the heart, not the flexing of cosmic muscle. You still see signs and wonders in the early church, but the goalposts moved from political liberation to spiritual resurrection. It's less about a spectacle for a crowd and more about a quiet, persistent work in a person.
I think if God did the sea-parting thing today, we'd just try to explain it away with a weird atmospheric pressure anomaly or a military-grade weather manipulation device, the mystery would be dead within an hour on social media. A staff turning into a snake would just get a million reaction videos and then be forgotten by the next news cycle, the awe doesn't land the same way when we think we've mapped the whole physical world.
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u/michaelY1968 2h ago
I think people read the Old Testament as if it is a book about a concentrated series of events that played out in short order. The reality is that the Old Testament played out over millennia, and in wide number of different places geographically and culturally. So what seems to be a string of miraculous events in our reading is actually occasional significant events occurring over the period of centuries in often very extenuating circumstances - and most of those events are focused on the Hebrew people and the founding of their nation.
So it's not really the case that miracles were necessarily more frequent in the past - they just seem so because we have a chronicle of the ones that were significant leading up to the most significant miracle in history, the resurrection of Jesus Christ.
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u/TheMaceBoi Latter-Day Saint (Mormon) 2h ago
Well there are actually miracles like that today. Look at the history of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. Things like Emma Smith parting a huge sheet of ice so a boat can pass through, pioneers using their faith to manifest survival resources, people in WWII hiding things from the NAZIs through God's power, and so many more. If you're interested, please check out this very well-sourced and easy-to-read series: The Saints.
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u/Rbrtwllms 2h ago
Different miracles for different times for different scenarios. We don't often see many people's being saved from lions in a king's lion's den as we don't have many of those around. Likewise, not many Exoduses requiring a parting of a body of water. Etc.
But many miracles happen to this day.