The Salvation of Babies Who Die, Part 1
Selected Scriptures
Some of you who tuned in to the Larry King Show a week ago Saturday will remember that Larry fired a question to me on the air that came out of nowhere. The question that reveals a nagging, troubling issue in the human heart. He asked me, "What about a two-year-old baby crushed at the bottom of the World Trade Center?"
I answered, "Instant heaven."
He replied with another question. "Wasn't a sinner?"
I again answered, "Instant heaven."
That's a compelling question, what about a baby crushed at the bottom of the Trade Center? What about any baby that dies? It's an agonizing question. It's a question that plagues Christians and non-Christians alike...what happens to babies that die?
All kinds of strange answers have been offered in the past. We don't need to deal with those, we need to know the right answer. I said, "Instant heaven." Now what was my authority for saying that? In a sound bite environment like that I didn't have time for an explanation and he didn't ask for one. But you deserve one so I'm going to tell you why I said what I said.
We're often hearing these days from those who are against war of any kind the statement, "Many innocent children will die and what about them?" This matter of death that exists in the world is obviously a massive force that operates in the realm of the little ones. We need to understand what it indicates, what it means. Life begins at conception, that is clear in Scripture. This is what the Bible teaches without question. So any death from the point of conception on is the death of a person and persons have eternal souls. Millions, perhaps billions of such souls have died throughout history. Millions continue to die today.
In fact, cumulatively in the modern era billions. One report I read in a book called Empty Arms says that up to 25 percent of all human conceptions do not complete the twentieth week of pregnancy...one out of four conceived die. Seventy-five percent of fatal deaths occur in the first twelve weeks. Neo-natal death, that is death in the womb, para-natal death, that is death at the time of birth occur in massive numbers even today with medical advancement. We have a larger population in the world than we've ever had, we have a lower mortality rate than we've ever had because of medical advancement, we still have a massive amounts of death. The latest statistics from the year 1999 indicate four million, three hundred and fifty thousand babies died in that year, infant mortality. Study concludes four million, three hundred and fifty thousand babies died is based upon statistical information and estimates are that the figures are so low that the actuality maybe more than that figure by double since most losses during pregnancy may not even be reported. The highest rates of infant mortality are found in the poorest and most primitive nations and at the same time the most pagan nations, mostly in Africa and Asia.
Take four million, three hundred and fifty thousand in the year 1999 and just keep adding the years and you can see the numbers of deaths are massive, staggering. These are, as I said, eternal souls and the question about "where are they?" then is of monumental significance. They're either populating hell at an incredible rate, or populating heaven at an equally incredible rate, or getting divided into heaven and hell. This is a question that needs to be answered, needs to be answered on the large scale, needs to be answered on the individual scale. A parent has the right to know...where is my baby? Where is my child? Where is that adult child of mine whose mind never developed and who for all intents and purposes mentally is still an infant? The death of one single baby in a family, the loss of one in a womb, the loss of a child at birth is significant.
There was a study some years ago that I read called "Mental Reactions to Para-natal Death," and it chronicled the parental reaction to the loss of a baby around the time of birth. Sixty percent of the parents surveyed were angry. Fifty percent of the men felt guilt. Ninety percent of the women felt guilt about the death of that child. Seventy-five percent were irritable. Sixty-five to seventy-five percent of the parents lost their appetite. Eighty to ninety percent lost their sleep and ninety-five to a hundred percent of them felt a profound and deep sadness.
It's important to understand that there are some amazing impacts of this on the life of parents. So when you look at it in the broad scale, millions upon millions of these little ones dying, or you look at the individual level and you see the sorrow and sadness that it brings into the life of a family, either perspective cries out for an answer. The agonizing mother in Afghanistan where a hundred and fifty babies out of a thousand die and at least that's the figures that are reported and it's likely double that, or the poor hungry mother in Angola where it is reported that two hundred out of a thousand die and it's likely double that, to you here in our congregation who lost a little one along the way, there needs to be an answer, there needs to be an answer from God, there needs to be an answer from God's Word to this troubling reality of infant death. You start adding up the years, you start adding up the millions, you start adding up the billions...the question, "Where are they?" becomes a very compelling question.
And you can add to that the very, I suppose, somewhat strange biblical indication that God Himself acknowledges, even authorizes the death of some infants. For example, in Isaiah 13:16 when God called for judgment on Babylon, He said, "Their little ones will also be dashed to pieces before their eyes." When God called for Assyria to make a war of judgment on Israel He said in Hosea 13:16, "Their little ones will be dashed to pieces," same statement. The same was said of Assyria's war on Egypt in Nahum chapter 3 and verse 10. Amazingly Psalm 137:8 and 9 says, "O daughter of Babylon, you devastated one, how blest will be the one who repays you with the recompense with which you have repaid us, how blest will be the one who seizes and dashes your little ones against the rocks." Blest will be a nation who punishes Babylon, even including the death of little ones.
What happens to these little ones? The death of which God authorizes, in a sense, in fulfilling His judgment purposes? I suppose it would also be fair to say that when a birth is successful this is because God has allowed that to happen. We can say what David said in Psalm 22 verse 9, "Yet Thou art He who didst bring me forth from the womb. Thou didst make me trust when upon my mother's breast upon Thee I was cast from birth. Thou hast been my God from my mother's womb." David acknowledged that life came from God and when that life survived the womb and the birth and actually began to live, it was a life that God had allowed to live. No death occurs apart from the purpose of God, no life occurs apart from the purpose of God.
Now remember in the original creation there was no death. And man, according to Genesis 1:26 to 28, was given the power to procreate, that is to produce life in a deathless world. That was God's original intent that Adam and Eve would be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth and they would literally produce life in a deathless world so that no...no life conceived would ever die. However, when Adam and Eve sinned, death came on all and death comes to all and it comes to many in infancy and childhood.
I suppose it would be an educated guess to say that perhaps half of the people ever conceived die before they reach any level of maturity. And again I ask the question...how does God deal with them? Is the answer comforting? Is the answer encouraging? is the answer hopeful? Or is it discouraging? Do they go instantly to heaven?
Why did I say that? I'm not the first one to try to deal with this, but there are a lot of people who aren't dealing with it today. I was on a panel at a conference, a large conference, with three other pastors and it was a question and answer panel and I was sitting up there with these other very fine pastors whom I love and respect. And one of the questions came from the audience was, "What happens to babies that die?" And they went down the first three and the answer in each case was, "I don't know," which isn't very comforting. And it puts me in a terrible spot because when it came to me I said, "They go to heaven...they go to heaven." And I tried to give a brief explanation of why I believe that's true.
But I thought as I've looked back on that so many times...how can you be a pastor and not get an answer to that question? Because you're dealing with people constantly who go through this. Even C.S. Lewis agreed with me. Now he didn't know it... C.S. Lewis in his wonderful book The Last Battle wrote about a terrible train accident, one of those terrible disasters that killed all the children in a family. And that surfaced the question...What about those children?...as any disaster does.
This is what he wrote. "And as God spoke, he no longer looked to them like a lion." You remember, he pictures God as a lion, Aslan. He said, "As God spoke he no longer looked at Him as a lion, but the things that began to happen after that were so great and beautiful that I cannot write them, and for us this is the end of all stories and we can say most truly that they all lived happily ever after. But for them it was only the beginning of the real story. All their life in this world had only been the cover of the title page, now at last they were beginning chapter one of the great story which goes on forever in which every chapter is better than the one before," end quote. That's the inimitable C.S. Lewis saying they were ushered into the real story.
Now that's prose, I know, but it's true, isn't it? It's right, isn't it?, to tell parents when children die they do live happily ever after. I think the Word of God will affirm the salvation of little ones who die.
A place to begin, Psalm 139...Psalm 139. What I'm going to do tonight is just give you a little bit of a look at Psalm 139, then I want to talk a little theology with you and I'm going to be precise as I can because this demands precision. And then next Sunday night I'm going to support the theology with the text of various scriptures. So this will be a two-part look at this issue.
Psalm 39...139 does provide for us a good starting place. I want you to look at verse 17. This is a place to launch our look and then we're going to go backwards in this first part of Psalm 139. "How precious also are Thy thoughts to me, O God; how vast is the sum of them." The psalmist, David, has captured some precious thoughts here, precious divine truths that mean so much to him, that's why he calls them precious. They are treasured truths. They are gems to hold on to. And what are they? Let's go back and find out.
First precious truth that the psalmist grips is that God knows everything about him, even before he could talk. Look at verse 1, "O Lord, Thou hast searched me and known me, Thou doest know when I sit down, when I rise up. Thou doest understand my thought from afar. Thou doest scrutinize my path and my lying down and are acquainted intimately with all my ways." You know everything about me, everything about me. You know me. You know when I sit down, when I rise up. In other words, you know every detail of every moment of every day. You know what I think. You know my path. You know my sleeping. You know everything intimately about all my ways and You have known it even before there is a word in my tongue. Before I could ever speak You knew everything about me. I was known to you in every element of my life. "Behold, O Lord, You know it all." God knows everything about me, even before I can talk.
The second precious truth is that God is actively involved in my life. Verse 5, "You have enclosed me behind and before. You've laid Your hand on me." In other words, You've got me backed up on both sides and covered on top. You're active in my life. I'm in the middle and You've got me surrounded. Verse 6, he says, "Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; it's too high, I can't attain it." You know everything about me before I can speak. You have my life completely in Your hands. You have pressured me from both sides. You've kept me contained and I can't get out the top because You're there. It's a precious truth, isn't it? From the very start You're actively involved in controlling my life.
A third precious thought is that God will never lose sight of or knowledge of me. There is no way I can ever be lost to You. "Where can I go from Your Spirit?" Verse 7, "Where can I flee from Your presence? If I ascend to heaven, You are there. If I make my bid in Sheol, behold You're there. If I take the wings of the dawn, if I dwell in the remotest part of the sea then there Thy hand will lead me, Thy right hand will lay hold of me." I can't go anywhere outside of Your knowledge. I can't go anywhere outside of Your vision. I will never be lost to You.
The fourth precious truth is that God will never be limited in that knowledge no matter how dark it gets. This is sort of metaphoric language, in a sense, it's never going to be so dark. You say, "Well I can see you in the light, but things might get so dark that God loses His view." No, he says in verse 11 and 12, "Surely the darkness will overwhelm me, I might say, and the light around me will be night." In other words, I'm going to fall into some circumstance, I'm going to fall into some problem, some dilemma, some condition and it's going to be so dark the Lord isn't going to be able to find me. And then verse 12 he says, "Even the darkness is not dark to Thee, the night is as bright as the day, darkness and light are alike to Thee."
Now the point of this is these are credibly precious thoughts of the psalmist and what they tell us is that God knows every single detail about his life from beginning to end, starting before he could ever say a word. How is it that God has this personal intimate knowledge? Answer...because God is...and here's the fifth precious thought...God is his personal creator. Verse 13, "For Thou didst form my inward parts. Thou didst weave me in my mother's womb." You put together the male chromosomes and the female chromosomes, You wove my DNA. You made me personally.
The sixth precious thought is in verse 16. You determined my destiny. You planned my life. "Thine eyes have seen my unformed substance." You saw me in Your sovereign view before I was ever formed. ""And in Your book everything about me was written down, the days that were ordained for me when as yet there wasn't one of them."
Now these are precious thoughts. God knows everything about me even before I can talk. God is in complete control of my life. God will never lose sight of me no matter what goes on. I can never be lost to God. There is no circumstance that can in any way limit His knowledge. The reason He knows me so well is He is my personal creator who has planned carefully my destiny. Those are precious thoughts.
It's not as if lives are being conceived willy-nilly and God's not involved. This is not just true of David. David is speaking for every man. He is speaking of intimate association between God and each human creation. God is intimately involved in every little life...every life. It's not just a chain of procreative acts that He inaugurated, He is there in every single conception. These are precious thoughts because this indicates to us how precious every life is. If every life is so precious that God knows it all, plans it all, guards and protects it all, never loses sight of anything then they must matter to Him. They must matter to Him.
And we could conclude from that alone that since God is by nature a Savior and since God is not willing that any should perish but all should come to repentance, and since God would have all men to be saved, there's every reason to believe just from that alone that a caring God who created that life to begin with, who superintends and guards that life, who knows intimately everything about that life, should that life perish physically in its infancy there would be every reason from that Psalm alone to trust the grace of God who is by nature a Savior in behalf of that life.
Let me show you a couple of other passages, and we're just starting to build a foundation here. In Job chapter 3 and verse 16 and 17, again I don't like the NAS translation as well as I like the New King James. Those of you who have the New King James version have a leg up on the translation. I'm going to read the New King James, it's a better representation, I think, here.
Job is in some serious despair. How do we know that? Verse 1 of Job 3. "Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth." Pretty serious despair. Job said, "Let the day perish in which I was to be born and the night which said, 'A boy is conceived.' May that day be darkness." I wish I had never been born this suffering is so profound...never been born.
In verses 16 and 17 this is what he says, "Why was I not hidden like a still-born child, like infants who never saw light? Why didn't I die in my mother's womb? There the wicked cease from troubling. There the weary are at rest."
What's he saying? He's saying I'd be better off if I had miscarried. I would be better off if I were still-born so I wouldn't have to face troubling life but I would enter immediately into...what?...rest...rest. Job understood that dying as an infant would bring one to rest and one would escape the pain of suffering. He certainly didn't believe that infants that die go to hell and some eternal torment, but rather had the confidence that they entered into rest.
In Ecclesiastes also in chapter 6, you don't have to turn to it you can just jot it down, Ecclesiastes 6:3 to 5. Solomon laments, he laments that a still-born child is better off than a person who lives a thousand years twice and doesn't enjoy the right things. He says, "What's the point of living two thousand years if you don't ever enjoy true goodness, you'd be better off a still-born child."
In both of these cases you have by implication the idea that being still-born takes you to a place of rest. Being still born is preferable to a life of wickedness, a life of unfulfillment. Now those are some implicit references. Next week we're going to look at some explicit references that I think support the fact not just implicitly but explicitly that children who die go to heaven. So if we answer yes, what about babies that die, if we say instant salvation, yes, how are we going to understand that in the light of sin? In the light of fallenness?
So, I'm going to ask and answer a few questions. I'm going to give you a little theology lesson here. First question, who qualifies as an infant or a child? Fair enough? People always say, "Well, what's the age of accountability?" That's the way the question is typically answered. I'd like to pose it another way, who qualifies as an infant or a child? Who are we talking about here? We heard testimonies tonight in the waters of baptism from some young people who were 13, is that the age? Is it 12? Is it 11? Is it 10? I heard from one young lady that she believes that her salvation occurred at the age of 7, another, I think, at the age of 10. What is that age? And you often hear that question asked.
That's really not the question because we're not talking about an age of accountability. Get this in your mind, we're talking about a condition of accountability. Get the word "age" out of this discussion. We're talking about a condition of accountability...not an age. Who qualifies then in our discussion as an infant or child who dying is saved, who dying instantly goes to heaven? Who are we talking about?
Answer...those who have not reached sufficient mature understanding in order to comprehend convincingly the issues of law and grace, sin and salvation. I'll say it again cause I thought about it a long time and this is the way I want you to hear it. We're talking about someone who has not reached sufficient mature understanding to comprehend convincingly the issues of law and grace and sin and salvation. This is certainly an infant in the womb. This is certainly an infant at birth. This is certainly a small child. And this is certainly a mentally impaired adult at any age. Anyone in the condition who cannot sufficiently understand and comprehend so as to be fully convinced of the issues of law and grace and sin and salvation. It's not an age, it is a condition. And from child to child it varies. And as I said, you have to include in this those who grow up mentally disadvantaged, mentally disabled, mentally retarded so as never to be able to have a sufficient mature understanding and a convincingly comprehensive grasp of law and grace and sin and salvation. This is not an age, this is a condition. That's who we're talking about, people in that condition where they cannot in a mature way understand and comprehend convincingly these issues. We're talking about those people. Are they saved if they die?
And the next question that we have to address in flaming up this discussion and I'm being careful in detail because I want this to be helpful to not only to us but to many people who are asking this question, so I want to be careful to cover everything. A second question...are all children conceived as sinners? Are all sinners conceived as sinners?
Now there is a belief, still around though it was condemned 1600 years ago, there is a belief that teaches that all people are born without sin. They're all born, we're all born morally clean. Sin only takes root in our lives when we commit our fist sin so we come in morally clean, this view says. And we commit sin by choice and then when we commit sin by choice we become sinners and not until. Those who hold this view find it very convenient in dealing with children because they say since these little ones can't make a moral choice to sin, they're therefore not sinners so when they die they go to heaven because they're not sinners. They die in sinlessness. As I said, 1600 years ago this view called plagianism(??) was denounced as a heresy by every church that met after the death of Palagius(??)...and yet it's survived till today in some forms of what we call Arminian theology. However, the Bible is absolutely crystal clear that all children are sinners from conception...all children. The principle of iniquity is imbedded in the human race. Children are born morally corrupt. They are born with an irresistible bent toward evil. And any notion that children are born morally neutral and free from a predisposition to sin is absolutely contrary to Scripture. And as I said, this view was denounced as heresy after the death of the one who propounded it and has been considered heresy by those faithful to biblical theology ever since.
All humans are born in sin. If infants were not sinful, if they were not morally corrupt, then they wouldn't die. If they were born innocent or pure or morally neutral there would be no basis for their death. The very fact that they die indicates that the disease of sin is there in them because sin is the killer. It is in their inherited sin nature that the seeds of death are planted.
And furthermore, do you know any adult that chose not to sin and therefore perpetuated some holy perfection? Do you know any adult that didn't repeat Adam and Eve's conscious rebellion against God? Do you know any adult that didn't actually sin? No, the only persons who don't actually sin are those who die in infancy and the only reason they don't actually sin is because they die before they can manifest their sinfulness. They die before they can make a responsible moral choice to rebel against God which all of them will do if they live. Any child who lives to the point of moral responsibility, any person who gets beyond that condition where they can't understand and they can't convincingly grasp the truths of salvation, any child who lives pass the point of responsible moral to the point of responsible moral choice will choose to sin. We all do. The Bible is absolutely clear that all infants who survive end up wretched sinners because it's in their nature. First Kings 8:46, "There is no man who doesn't sin." Psalm 51:5, "Behold, I was brought forth in iniquity, in sin my mother conceived me." It doesn't mean he was an illegitimate child, that's not the case. But from the very conception sin was there imbedded in his nature.
Psalm 58:3, "The wicked are estranged from the womb. And those who speak lies go astray from birth." Psalm 143:2, "In Thy sight no one living is righteous," that is from conception on, in the womb, at birth, in infancy, in childhood or adulthood, no one is righteous. Proverbs 20 and verse 9, "Who can say I have cleansed my heart, I'm pure from sin?" No one. Ecclesiastes 7 and verse 20, "Indeed there is not a righteous man on earth who does good and never sins." Jeremiah 17:9, "The heart of man is deceitful above all things and desperately wicked, and who can know it?" Everything in Scr