Disability and God's Will: Challenging Harmful Thinking and Embracing Healing

The Temptation of Seeing Disability as God's Will

I recently heard a disabled preacher state that his disability was God’s will. As a disabled person myself, I can understand the temptation to think this way – there’s a perceived comfort in believing one’s particular limitations have a divine purpose, but for me, this is lazy and harmful thinking. If we pause even for a moment to consider the implications of this idea, it is cruelty made manifest.

This particular chap might find comfort in the idea that there’s a reason behind his suffering, but he can’t have put much thought into what this might mean to those listening to his sermon. What of those who are disabled themselves or have a much more seriously disabled loved one? Was that God’s will too? What of stillborn children, or those whose condition causes them to die minutes after birth? If one person’s disability is God’s will, then surely every form of disability, however catastrophic and life-limiting, must also be a perfect expression of the will of God. Moreover, this purported God of love must be responsible for every miscarriage and inherited disease and disorder. If this were true, God would be unworthy of our love.

I get it – we all want to make sense of our lives, but for me the cost of thinking this way is far too high.

Smearing God’s Nature

How often do we say that God is love? If we want the world to respond to that, we need to faithfully and consistently present divine love in the form of Jesus. As Richard Murray recently posted on his Facebook page:

It’s not just that Jesus translates God for us. It’s that Jesus IS the translation of God.

In other words, if you can’t see it in Jesus, it is not part of the nature of God. All the confusion and contradiction of Old Covenant passages shouldn’t distract us from this simple truth, because Jesus came to reveal the undiluted nature of God. He couldn’t have been more explicit about it. John 14:8-10

Philip said, ‘Lord, show us the Father and that will be enough for us.’

Jesus answered: ‘Don’t you know me, Philip, even after I have been among you such a long time? Anyone who has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, “Show us the Father”? Don’t you believe that I am in the Father, and that the Father is in me? The words I say to you I do not speak on my own authority. Rather, it is the Father, living in me, who is doing his work.’

When we overlook the healing ministry of Jesus and cling to our suffering as divinely purposed instead, we minimise and slander the goodness of God.

The Poison of Cognitive Dissonance

In my view, much of the Evangelical movement is painfully confused about the nature of God. On the one hand we sing and talk of God’s love, calling him our defender, healer, and saviour, but on the other we idolise individual believers who claim their sufferings are the will of God. We laud them, admire them, exalt them, invite them to speak, buy their books, and glorify them, instead of glorifying the God of healing. Internally, this double mindedness leaves us in a terrible mess, our intimacy with God limited by uncertainty about his fundamental nature. When we think this way, we move away from childlike trust and keep God at a distance – our inner child knows to hide in the presence of a monster.

Cognitive dissonance is mental anguish, and in my experience, there is no Christian group suffering more profoundly from this than the Evangelical movement. We are deeply committed to the sin of self-harm.

If we want to see God as he is, we must return to Jesus again and again. How did he express the love of God? As part of his ministry, did he ever give someone a disability, sickness, or disorder? Of course not. That would have ripped his very nature apart. Even when people were ungrateful, he healed every one of them.

Slandering Jesus

There is a passage which is often used to argue that sickness is an expression of the will of God. John 9: 1-7

As he went along, he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’

‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned,’ said Jesus, ‘but this happened so that the works of God might be displayed in him. As long as it is day, we must do the works of him who sent me. Night is coming, when no one can work. While I am in the world, I am the light of the world.’

After saying this, he spat on the ground, made some mud with the saliva, and put it on the man’s eyes. ‘Go,’ he told him, ‘wash in the Pool of Siloam’ (this word means ‘Sent’). So the man went and washed, and came home seeing.

The argument goes that this man was made blind so that the works of God might be displayed in him – i.e. that his sickness in and of itself brought glory to God. Let’s dig a little deeper.

For me, the intent of Jesus’ words is obvious – that sickness, which is intended to harm us and is therefore an enemy, is thwarted when we are healed. The works of God were indeed seen when Jesus opened the blind man’s eyes, or in other words, it is healing and not sickness that glorifies God. To suggest otherwise is to turn a blind eye to Jesus’ continual devotion to healing during his time on Earth, deliberately twisting the ambiguous words of a single passage to justify the status quo of our lives. In this way, we dishonour God and ourselves.

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that any person should feel bad about their sicknesses, disabilities, or disorders. That would be wretched. As previously intimated, I live with long-term conditions that affect me daily, but this in no way compromises my belief in a God of healing. I’ve never judged myself as lacking faith or any of that nonsense, even when others are healed and I am not. We serve a God of love, not a God of competition, pressure, and performance. For me, both extremes are as harmful as each other – living under the self-imposed pressure to receive God’s healing, and embracing polluting theology that considers sickness part of the perfect will of God.

God is Glorified by Healing

I’ve written on what the Bible teaches it means to glorify God in a previous article, which contains some marvellous surprises. In essence, glory is divine light, issuing from God rather than being given to God. You and I glorify God when his light shines through our lives; when we receive his love and he is seen for who he is. That is why every time Jesus healed the crowds, the Bible states that God was glorified by the onlookers. The miracles of Jesus revealed a God of compassion and healing.

Living with Limitations and Glorifying God

I understand that healing is something we currently only experience sporadically, though some churches and movements seem to have tapped into that aspect of grace more than others. The truth is, the Kingdom of God is not yet fully come in the Earth, and we are yet to see the full manifestation of the will of God, but we should not be confused about what that will looks like.

I want to see a greater release of God’s grace, nourishing and strengthening the Church in preparation for our great calling – bringing down the gates of Hell! To move forwards, we need to dump our convoluted and confused theology, quit apologetics for spiritually dissatisfying lives, and simplify our understanding of God’s nature, focusing on Jesus as the absolute, perfect image of God.