Why does God allow birth defects?
Few questions press harder than this one: a child arrives in the world already carrying a condition no one chose, and the parents are left asking what they did wrong. Scripture faces the question directly in John 9, where Jesus meets a man blind from birth, and His answer refuses the assumption that hides behind most of our asking.
Where all such damage comes from
The Bible does trace disease back to a source, but the source is the fall of the whole race, not the private failure of one family. Physical weakness is part of what it now means to be human.
William KellyThrough one man, says the great apostle, sin entered into the world, and death through sin. When man fell, "dying you shall die" began; and Adam was only a father after he sinned. The race is a fallen one. Physical maladies are the symptoms and evidence of the mortality that is the portion of every child of Adam.
Writers on John 9 make the same link while denying the disciples' version of it. One puts it this way:
L. M. GrantOf course the root of this is sin, but not, as the disciples supposed, some particular sin (v. 2)... But sin, the root of sins, has infected the very nature that we all have as children of Adam. This is the reason for all sickness and for spiritual blindness from birth also.
Not a sentence passed on the sufferer
The disciples wanted a culprit. Jesus named none, and commentators warn against reading every affliction as a verdict from God.
C. E. StuartTo some governmental dealing on the part of God such an affliction was commonly attributed... Every bodily affliction, however, is not sent in chastisement, though at times that may be the reason for it (1 Cor. 11:30; Mark 2:5-10). In the case of Lazarus (John 11:4), as in this, God's governmental dealing was the cause neither of the sickness nor of the blindness. We need spiritual discernment as to such dealing on the part of our God, since men are too apt, like the friends of Job, to treat God's hand on a person as a token of divine dealing for some sin or evil course.
A higher reason than punishment
Jesus moved the question from blame to purpose. What looked like a flaw in the way the world is run became the very place where God chose to act.
G. V. WigramThis question is so like the mind of man. Christ says, "I do not take it up in that light." He takes up God's side, showing that sorrow and privation are connected in God's mind with some work of power not yet brought out. It was as it were a spot in providence that this man was born blind. Christ says, "I am come into the scene where everything is out of course, to gladden hearts, and display the glory of God."
Notice who was chosen. The very hopelessness of the case made it fit for God's hand.
William KellyThe reason lay deeper than what his parents deserved, or the foresight of what he would do amiss... To divine goodness, the inner and true and ultimate reason, God's reason — if one may be permitted such a phrase — was to furnish an opportunity for Christ to work the works of God on the earth. How blessedly grace operates in, and judges of, a hopeless case! That it was wholly outside the resources of man made it just the occasion for Jesus.
When the condition is not removed
That "work of God" does not always look like a cure. One writer applies the verse to lives where the disability stays.
F. B. HoleThe Lord's reply shows that affliction may come without there being any element of retribution in it, but simply in order that God's work may be manifested. It was manifested here in working a complete deliverance from the affliction. It may just as strikingly be manifested by complete deliverance from the depression and weight of the affliction, while the affliction itself still persists; and so it is often seen today.
What the man ended up with
The story does not stop at open eyes. He came to know who had opened them, and that changed how his whole life looked to him.
James BoydHow good it was for this man that he had been born blind, that he might be the subject of the work of God; that he might feel upon his eyes the hands of Jesus, and get sight directly from Him. No doubt he had many a time previously been heard to bewail his hard lot, but now his murmurings are forever silenced. Better to be born sightless, and have God intervene for him in this way, than have all his faculties, and never to know the compassion of God.
God is not deaf to it
Nothing here treats the pain as small, and nothing suggests God means it to last.
An Outline of Sound WordsHow great must be the sound of the groan that reaches the ear of God through the sorrows and sufferings of man and beast. What pain is suffered by man and beast through disease and death and all the ravages of sin! But God has planned for the removal of the groan, and the deliverance of the creature that has suffered through the fall of man.
Summary
- Root — Bodily weakness belongs to a fallen race, not to one family's guilt; sickness is a symptom of the mortality every descendant of Adam shares.
- Not a verdict — Jesus named no guilty party. Reading affliction as punishment repeats the mistake of Job's friends, though at times God does deal with specific sin.
- Purpose — What man reads as a flaw in providence, God treats as the appointed place for a work of power not yet revealed.
- Display — The case beyond human resources is exactly the case grace takes up; God's work shows either in removing the affliction or in lifting its weight while it remains.
- Result — The man gained more than sight: he came to know the compassion of God, and his complaints were silenced forever.