An infant was hospitalized with uncontrolled violent vomiting just days after his birth. He was diagnosed with gastroparesis, or stomach paralysis, an incurable condition that impairs the moving of food from the stomach into the small intestine.1 Two feeding tubes were inserted — and they helped keep him alive for the next decade and a half.
“Living with feeding tubes was a struggle, to say the least,” the patient said years later. “Growing up being an active child, it was difficult to get the hydration and nutrition necessary.”
On November 6, 2011, when he was sixteen years old, the patient went with his family to a Pentecostal church. The speaker described how his own life had been spared when his intestines were severed in a serious accident. As the pastor recounted his healing, the teen reported feeling a “pulsating sensation” in his abdomen, “as if God was preparing me.”
Afterward, the pastor laid hands on the teen and prayed for Jesus to miraculously heal him.
- “During the prayer, I felt an electric shock that started from my right shoulder and traveling down through my stomach,” the teen said. “That was the moment that I knew I had been touched by the Holy Spirit.”
Indeed, doctors confirmed he had been spontaneously and totally healed. They removed the two feeding tubes, and the patient has been able to eat normally and has been completely healthy while free of any medications for more than a dozen years.
“Since I have been healed of my illness, I have had more energy than ever before, and have thoroughly enjoyed the new adventure of trying all different types of foods,” he said. “I have entered into the medical field in search to help the sick and needy, and to give back the great care I received as a patient.”
Three medical researchers investigated this healing and ended up publishing the case study — the first reported instantaneous healing of this otherwise hopeless condition — in a peer-reviewed medical journal.2
Are there miracles today that point toward a supernatural power and presence? Yes, there are.
While there are cases of fraud, confirmation bias, the placebo effect, and medical mistakes, there are also authentic healings that are medically well-documented and give us confidence in the existence of a loving God.
The late philosopher Richard L. Purtill offered this definition of a genuine miracle: “A miracle is an event (1) brought about by the power of God that is (2) a temporary (3) exception (4) to the ordinary course of nature (5) for the purpose of showing that God has acted in history.”3
Some of what we casually call miracles are probably no more than fortunate “coincidences.” But when I see something that is absolutely extraordinary, has spiritual overtones, and is validated or corroborated by an independent source, that’s when the “miracle bell” goes off in my mind — for example, a teen’s spontaneous healing of an otherwise incurable condition as prayers for his recovery were being offered to Jesus.
In my quest to document the supernatural, I flew to Lexington, Kentucky, and then drove twenty minutes to the two-stoplight town of Wilmore — whose municipal water tower is topped with a giant white cross — to question the author of a landmark study on the miraculous.
INTERVIEW with CRAIG S. KEENER, PHD
It all started as a footnote.
While working on his massive commentary on the Book of Acts (yes, massive — comprising nearly 4,500 pages over four volumes), Craig Keener began writing a footnote about the miracles that are found in this New Testament account of the early Christian movement.
He observed that some modern readers discount the historicity of Acts because they dismiss the possibility of miracles, believing that the uniform experience of humankind is that the miraculous simply doesn’t occur. But are those claims reasonable?
Keener began researching. And writing. The footnote grew and grew. The more he discovered, the more convinced he became that miracles are more common than a lot of people think and better documented than many skeptics claim.
Two years later, his book Miracles was published — again, an exhaustive scholarly undertaking, so sweeping that it covers two volumes and a staggering 1,172 pages. Scholar Ben Witherington III gushed that it is “perhaps the best book ever written on miracles in this or any age.” That comment prompted Professor Craig Blomberg to declare, “The ‘perhaps’ is unnecessarily cautious.”
In the first twenty-five years after receiving his doctorate at Duke University, Keener authored twenty-one books. His award-winning, four-volume Acts: An Exegetical Commentary is some three million words in length, densely packed with scholarly insight written with a pastor’s heart. “Keener is a scholar with gifts that come along once every century,” said Gary Burge of Calvin Theological Seminary.
Keener’s curriculum vitae is the size of a small book. His two-volume Miracles: The Credibility of the New Testament Accounts, which is 620,000 words in length, was followed up in 2021 with Miracles Today: The Supernatural Work of God in the Modern World.
Now a professor of biblical studies at Asbury Theological Seminary, Keener is married to Médine, who holds a doctorate and teaches French, and they have two adopted children from Africa. I sat with Keener in the basement office at his home, where his cluttered desk is surrounded by twenty-nine file cabinets packed with research.
He described himself as a former spiritual skeptic who “liked to make fun of Christians.” But at age fifteen, after an encounter on a street corner with a few Christians who awkwardly tried to tell him about Jesus, he was alone in his bedroom and started arguing with himself. This can’t be right. But what if it is?
“And then I sensed it,” he said.
“Sensed what?” I asked.
“God’s very presence — right there, right then, right in my room.
I had been wanting empirical evidence, but instead God gave me something else — the evidence of His presence. So it wasn’t apologetics that reached me; my brain had to catch up afterward. I was simply overwhelmed by the palpable presence of God. It was like Someone was right there in the room with me, and it wasn’t something I was generating, because it wasn’t what I was necessarily wanting.”
At the time, Keener prayed, “God, those guys on the corner said Jesus died for me and rose again and that’s what saves me. If that’s what You’re saying, I’ll accept it. But I don’t understand how that works. So if You want to save me, You’re going to have to do it Yourself.”
“Did He?” I asked.
“All of a sudden, I felt something rushing through my body that I had never experienced before. I jumped up and said, What was that? I knew God had come into my life. At that moment, I was filled with wonder and worship.”
Two days later, Keener sought out a minister, who led him in a formal prayer of repentance and faith. “And for the first time, I understood what my purpose was. What the purpose is.”
“What is that?”
“Our purpose is found in God — to live for Him, to serve Him, to worship Him.” He paused, giving emphasis to one further thought:
“Everything is to be built around Jesus.”
A Proliferation of Miracles
A physician picked up Keener’s two-volume book on miracles with one goal in mind — to further sharpen his highly skeptical worldview. “I was ready to ‘see through’ yet another theologian who didn’t know much about psychosomatic illnesses, temporary improvements with no long-term follow up, incorrect medical diagnoses, conversion disorders, faked cures, self-deception, and the like,” he said.
But he admitted, “I was blind-sided.”
In Keener’s book he encountered hundreds of case studies — reports of extraordinary healings and other incredible events backed up by eyewitnesses and, in many cases, clear-cut corroborating evidence.
“I read them with the critical eye of a skeptic having many years of medical practice under the belt,” the doctor said. To his utter astonishment, he found many cases to be stunning. “They couldn’t just be dismissed with a knowing answer and a cheery wave of the hand. With respect to my world view, I had had the chair pulled out from underneath me.”4
Another doctor agreed. In an endorsement for Keener’s Miracles Today, Joseph Bergeron, author of The Crucifixion of Jesus, wrote, “As a physician, I found Keener’s descriptions of physical healing credible and compelling.”
Such is the persuasive power of the evidence for many miraculous claims. It’s even enough to win over, well, Keener himself.
“When I was an atheist, of course I didn’t believe the miraculous was possible,” Keener told me. “But even after I came to faith, I still retained quite a bit of skepticism. As a Christian, I believed in miracles in principle, but I have to admit that I doubted the veracity of many claims I would hear.”
Keener told me he “tried to maintain intellectual honesty” in his research and to “follow the clues wherever they led.” And where did those clues take him?
“Everywhere I looked, I came across miracle claims that better fit a supernatural explanation than a naturalistic conclusion. Pretty soon, there was an avalanche of examples.”
“Such as?”
“Such as...,” he repeated, eager to take up the challenge. Keener mentally scrolled through examples from the case studies he had encountered, and he began speaking in a tone that was at once urgent and earnest.
“Cataracts and goiters — instantly and visibly healed,” he said. “Paralytics suddenly able to walk. Multiple sclerosis radically cured. Broken bones suddenly mended. Hearing for the deaf. Sight for the blind. Voices restored. Burns disappearing. Massive hemorrhaging stopped. Failing kidneys cured. Rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis — gone.
- Life given back to the dead, even after several hours.
“I have accounts from around the world — China, Mozambique, the Philippines, Nigeria, Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Ecuador, Indonesia, South Korea, and other countries. Multiple and independent eye-witnesses with reputations for integrity, including physicians. Names, dates, medical documentation in many cases. There’s even a peer-reviewed scientific study confirming the healing of the deaf.
“And the timing is usually the most dramatic element — instantaneous results right after prayers to Jesus. Lots of cancer healings too — malignant brain tumors and reticulum-cell sarcoma, for example — but I didn’t include most of those in the book, since I knew people would write them off as spontaneous remissions. Still, when the remission happens so quickly and completely after specific prayers, that’s very suspicious.”
“Your conclusion from all of this is — what?”
“That apart from some sort of divine intervention, many of these phenomena seem inexplicable.”
“What are some of the strongest cases in terms of witnesses and corroborating evidence?” I asked.
Keener smiled and sat back in his chair. “How long do you have?” he asked.
1. The Mayo Clinic confirms there is no cure for gastroparesis (see “Gastroparesis,” Mayo Clinic, accessed August 31, 2024, www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/gastroparesis/symptoms-causes/syc-20355787).
2. Clarissa Romez, David Zaritzky, and Joshua W. Brown, “Case Report of Gastroparesis Healing: 16 Years of a Chronic Syndrome Resolved after Proximal Intercessory Prayer,” Complementary Therapies in Medicine 43 (April 2019): 289–94, www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii /S0965229918313116.
3. Richard L. Purtill, “Defining Miracles,” in In Defense of Miracles: A Comprehensive Case for God’s Action in History, ed. R. Douglas Geivett and Gary R. Habermas (Downers Grove, IL: InterVarsity, 1997), 72.Excerpted with permission from Seeing the Supernatural by Lee Strobel, copyright Lee Strobel.
4. Quoted in Philip Yancey, “Jesus and Miracles,” August 20, 2015, Philip Yancey blog, www.philipyancey.com/Jesus-and-miracles, emphasis added.
Excerpted with permission from Seeing the Supernatural by Lee Strobel, copyright Lee Strobel.
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Your Turn
As believers, we don’t live only in the natural world. God invites us into the supernatural. Miracles, real miracles, are valid and true — so much so that even skeptics and atheists have to acknowledge that healing occurred. What healing are you praying for? ~ Devotionals Daily
