Seeing God’s purpose in creating people with disabilities in Exodus 4 and noticing Jesus’s purpose in healing people with disabilities helps provide guardrails for our own thinking about disabilities. They are not accidental or without purpose. They are not a result of our sin or God’s apathy. 

Building a Theology of Disability

The Bible isn’t a disability ministry handbook, but it’s a head and heart book—it teaches us how to think about disabilities and how to treat those with disabilities (including how to view ourselves if we are ever diagnosed with a disability).

Let’s focus on passages that illustrate the overarching view of disabilities in Scripture. We will build our theology of disability on these passages. Jen Wilkin and J. T. English write in their book, You Are a Theologian, that theology is a means of organizing the ideas given to us in God’s word. So when I talk about building a theology of disability, what I mean is organizing and understanding passages in Scripture about disability. Having a theology of disability matters because, as they write, “we think differently, feel differently, and act differently as a result of developing better categories for understanding God.”1

1. Genesis 1

We will start at the beginning of the world as we build our theology of disability. It starts with our theology of man, which of course begins at creation:

Then God said, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness. And let them have dominion over the fish of the sea and over the birds of the heavens and over the livestock and over all the earth and over every creeping thing that creeps on the earth.”

      So God created man in his own image,
            in the image of God he created him;
            male and female he created them. (Gen. 1:26–27)

Man was created by God and in the image of God. Being created in the image of God sets humans apart from everything else God created. However, the fall and sin distort our ability to reflect God perfectly, but the image of God remains in each person.

What it means to be created in the image of God has been discussed for centuries and has not always been agreed on. Theologians Joel Beeke and Paul Smalley remind us, “As fallen human beings, we are not in a position to understand the image of God completely. We do not fully know what it means to be human.”2 Even though we can’t fully know, what we do understand about the image of God has implications for how we view and treat others, especially those with disabilities.

Beeke and Smalley underscore that “the image consists centrally of inward righteousness and a right relationship to God, but more broadly encompasses man’s whole nature along with his divinely ordained function.”3 What’s helpful about this view is that it doesn’t reduce God’s image to only the roles we play or the capacities we have.

Although the image of God can include functions and characteristics, it is more than that. If the image of God were only about our dominion over the earth, those who have opportunities to have more dominion might be seen as reflecting more of God’s image. Or if it were primarily about intelligence and understanding, those with the highest IQs would resemble God most. Instead, 1 Corinthians says, “But God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God chose what is weak in the world to shame the strong . . . so that no human being might boast in the presence of God” (1 Cor 1:27, 29). If it were only about doing, would we still image God if we failed to function? Instead of only imaging God (a verb), we are the image of God (a noun). The image is about who man is and not just what he does.

Beyond being simply functional, the image of God is also relational. Being able to have a relationship with God and having the potential for salvation and sanctification (the ability to reflect Jesus, who is the image of God) is an essential characteristic of the imago Dei. It is holistic and ontological, based on who people are and not what they do. John Kilner writes, “Being made in the image of God involves connection and reflection. Creation in God’s image entails a special connection with God and also God’s intention that people be a meaningful reflection of God, to God’s glory.”4 This understanding better represents realities for people with disabilities who reflect the image of God. As John Hammett contends, “We may affirm that each person has the capacity for a relationship with God because we believe God has the capacity to reach every human spirit.”5

2. Psalm 139

In Psalm 139, David writes of this love and care in God’s creation of himself. In the sensory class I teach each week at our church, the Seeds Kids Worship version of this Psalm is the first song I play. I want our kids to know that God has a plan for their design, and that his plan is for their good and his glory. They can echo what David knows to be true:

For you formed my inward parts;
    you knitted me together in my mother’s womb.
I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully made.

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