There are many types and causes of blindness, from injuries and infections to neurological or congenital conditions. Scientists typically divide blindness into several categories that either fall under partial or total blindness: vision impairment, legal blindness, low vision, and total blindness. Congenital blindness, like any other problem that develops before you are born, is the kind of blindness that occurs while a baby is still developing in utero. In the first few weeks of life, doctors screen infants’ vision as a part of routine exams. Although babies can’t tell you what they see or how they see it, a pediatrician performs specific tests to check for any vision problems.

Babies born with severely impaired vision, or no vision have congenital blindness. It can develop from several types of genetic mutations or maternal infections during pregnancy. Congenital blindness is vision loss or severe vision impairment that is present at birth. There are several types of congenital blindness: anophthalmos (one or both eyes missing), microphthalmos (eyes are abnormally small), coloboma (areas of tissue in the eye are missing), congenital cataracts, infantile glaucoma, neuro-ophthalmic lesions, and more.

We’re not told exactly which type of congenital blindness this man in John 9 is suffering from…but I think it’s safe to say by the details in the story that it is total and complete, not partial blindness—regardless of the specific cause—whether he born with one eye—small eyes—no eyes, lesions, glaucoma, cataract—he was totally blind…Which is why he was forced to the poor, and hopeless, and lowly, and destitute life of a homeless beggar, eking out a living from generous passersby on the streets of Jerusalem who would take pity on him and drop him a denarius or two…

This is a man who was cut-off from his society as a filthy, homeless, unclean beggar. A man who was despised by his own people—the Jewish people in Jerusalem—and especially by the religious, “righteous,” law-abiding, “clean” religious elite. This a miserable man, homeless and hopeless, wretched and worthless, unclean and unworthy, unlovable and irredeemable. And yet, this is exactly the type of person that Jesus, the Son and Savior of God came to seek and to save—and to lay down his life to redeem.

This story, is an incredible picture of the immeasurable love of God manifest through the irresistible grace of God in the person of the Son of God, extended towards the lowliest of lives, a blind beggar who was seemingly cut-off from God—and yet who was not beyond the redeeming power of God—nor outside the redeeming plan of God, including his tragic circumstances of being born blind—even that was intended by God for his life so that God would one day manifest his glory through an awesome display of healing power—both physically, and as the story unfolds, spiritually for this man.

And not only that, but the physical transformation of the blind beggar’s sight being physically restored, is a beautiful picture of the spiritual transformation that God produces through the new birth, as he opens the spiritually blind eyes that previously cannot see the glory of God in the face of his Son Jesus Christ, and can now behold him—and not only behold, but believe in him.

Seeing is believing because if you’ve been given new eyes to see him, to behold the king in his beauty, you cannot help or resist but to believe in him, and believing is seeing because if you truly believe, then you can be sure you see him for who he is, God, Lord, Savior, and King. Do you believe this? Can you see this? Can you see him? Do you believe in him? Or are you yet blind, deaf, dumb, numb, and in total darkness, which means dead, spiritually speaking?