Can only God work wonders?

What follows is one scholar’s way of reading this disagreement — a critical-historical view that often concludes the texts genuinely disagree. It draws on the peer-reviewed sources listed below and stands as one position among the answers above, presented for transparency, not as GEBible’s position.

How critical scholarship weighs this: Leans toward reconciliation

This summarizes where critical scholarship tends to land on this tension — a report on the field’s center of gravity, not GEBible’s own ruling.

The tension turns partly on vocabulary and partly on cosmology. Psalm 136:4 praises Yahweh as l'oseh nifla'ot gedolot l'vaddo, "the one who alone does great wonders," within a litany whose every line is capped by "for his steadfast love endures forever" (ki l'olam chasdo). The Septuagint renders the line tō poiounti thaumasia megala monō. 2 Thessalonians 2:9 describes the parousia of the lawless one as kat' energeian tou Satana en pasē dynamei kai sēmeiois kai terasin pseudous — "according to the working of Satan, with all power and signs and lying wonders." The triad dynamis (power), sēmeia (signs), and terata (wonders) is the same vocabulary used for divine and apostolic miracles elsewhere in the New Testament (Acts 2:22; 2 Corinthians 12:12; Hebrews 2:4) and for God's wonders in the Septuagint. If Satan can produce terata, Yahweh does not do them "alone."

The strongest apologetic move (Wanamaker in the NIGTC, Bruce in the WBC) parses the genitive pseudous ("of falsehood") as the operative qualifier and reads the phrase as either counterfeit wonders that merely appear miraculous or genuine displays whose falseness lies in the message they serve. The first reading would neutralize the contradiction outright: if Satan's wonders are fake, then only God performs real ones. But the syntax and the parallels resist that reading. The single genitive pseudous most naturally governs the whole triad and characterizes the wonders' purpose — they are wonders in the service of the Lie — rather than denying that anything actually happens. The closest parallel, Revelation 13:13-14, says the beast "performs great signs (sēmeia megala), even making fire come down from heaven before people," and "deceives" by means of "the signs it was permitted to perform" — the deception works precisely because the signs are real. Abraham Malherbe's Anchor Bible commentary and most critical interpreters accordingly take pseudous as modifying the deceptive function, not the ontological reality, of the wonders.

Decisively, the Hebrew Bible itself already destabilizes the levaddo claim before 2 Thessalonians enters the picture. In Exodus 7:11-12 and 7:22 and 8:7 (Hebrew 8:3) the chartummim, Pharaoh's magicians, replicate Aaron's serpent and the first two plagues b'lateihem, "by their secret arts" — the narrative presents these as actual counter-wonders, not illusions, even as Aaron's staff swallows theirs. Deuteronomy 13:1-3 (Hebrew 13:2-4) legislates for the case of a prophet or dreamer who gives an ot o mofet — a "sign or wonder" — that actually comes to pass yet summons Israel to other gods; the law assumes such figures can perform genuine, fulfilled signs, and tests them by doctrine rather than by efficacy. The point of Psalm 136's l'vaddo is thus doxological: it celebrates Yahweh's incomparability and his role as sole author of the redemptive wonders of creation and exodus catalogued in the psalm, not a metaphysical decree that no created or hostile agent can produce supernatural phenomena. Hebrew praise routinely uses "alone" and "none besides" as confessional superlatives (cf. Isaiah 45:5-6), not analytic propositions.

The apologetic conclusion — that only God's wonders are salvific, authentic, or ultimately attributable to him — is essentially sound as a theological reading, but it is itself a harmonization that supplies qualifiers the psalmist never states. Psalm 136 says "alone"; Exodus, Deuteronomy, Revelation, and 2 Thessalonians each present other agents performing real signs. The contradiction is therefore real at the level of unqualified diction and dissolves only once one grants that levaddo is praise-language rather than a claim about the distribution of supernatural causal power.

Where the critical reading lands: real surface contradiction, partially harmonizable by genre — and notably, the Hebrew Bible's own narrative texts complicate the 'alone' of Psalm 136 long before the New Testament does.