Do Babies Really Go to Heaven?, Part 1

What does God's Word actually lead us to believe? Well, let me tell you at the outset of this marathon message, okay, that it doesn't allow us one neat verse, one easily interpreted packaged text that clarifies for us that the death of the preborn, the miscarried, the aborted, or even the mentally disabled, what we could call perpetual children, innocent, that they immediately are ushered into heaven. It begins at conception. Babies inside their mother's wombs are fully human. And if that's true, that means that those babies have a soul.

So that leads to this important question. What happens to a baby who dies while still in the womb? Or what about a child who dies after being born?

Do babies really go to heaven when they die? This important question is our theme today here on Wisdom for the Heart. Stay with us as Stephen Davey takes us to God's Word to bring help, hope, and comfort to parents today. We arrive today at a most interesting text and heart rending in its implications.

And I want us to take enough time to deal with what could easily be skipped over because it's difficult to address. Following Nathan's confrontation, if you were with us in our last study, he tells David the discipline of God will, among other things, bring about the death of their child. Through sickness, ultimately the purposes of God will be fulfilled in this manner. So David, verse 16, we're told, sought God on behalf of the child. And David fasted and went in and lay all night on the ground. And the elders of his house stood beside him to raise him from the ground, but he would not, nor did he eat food with them. On the seventh day, the child died. And the servants of David were afraid to tell him that the child was dead, for they said, Behold, while the child was yet alive, we spoke to him, and he did not listen to us. How then can we say to him the child is dead?

He may do himself some harm. But when David saw that his servants were whispering together, he perceived, understood, that the child was dead. And he said to his servants, Is the child dead?

And they said, He is dead. Then David arose from the earth, washed and anointed himself and changed his clothes. And he went into the house of the Lord and worshiped. He then went to his own house, and when he asked, they said, Food before him, and he ate. And then his servants said to him, What is this thing that you've done? You fasted and wept for the child while he was alive, but when the child died, you arose and ate food. He said, While the child was still alive, I fasted and wept, for I said, Who knows whether the Lord will be gracious to me and the child may live. But now he is dead.

Why should I fast? Can I bring him back again? Rhetorical question, assuming the answer would be no. I shall go to him, but he will not return to me. In the death of their child, David and Bathsheba, irrespective of the discipline or the mystery of the purposes of God, in this manner they entered a community of suffering, a community that has grown by the millions, a community that you may be included in today. Regardless of the fact that their baby's death was uniquely part of God's purpose in disciplining their immorality, the Lord could have disciplined them in a number of ways.

And evidently, according to his plan, and in our last study I mentioned the mercy of God, this boy is not allowed to grow up to take the brunt of what will ultimately bring about the loss of David's kingdom. But the text raises this heart-rending issue, an issue which millions of parents, moms and dads who know firsthand the language of suffering through the loss of a baby. Infant mortality is a term technically used to refer to the death of a baby before its first birthday. I found it interesting that the state of North Carolina is one of the top three states with the highest infant mortality rate in the country. Nearly eight babies out of every 1,000 live births die, which means then in the last year out of the 120,000 babies that were born, 900 or so died before their first birthday. If you add to that the number of babies that are miscarried, the number skyrockets. In fact, if you work off global statistics outside our own state, the numbers are frankly astronomical. One World Health Organization reports that in one year alone, more than 4 million babies die on average. In countries like Afghanistan, for example, the rate of infant mortality is 100 times greater than the state of North Carolina.

Experts in the field, as they research the data globally, placed the actual figure of infant mortality at somewhere around 10 million babies a year. If you add up all of the years as you're mentally perhaps thinking, the years of human history, you begin to stagger under this thought, don't you? A thought that certainly came to me at this juncture in the biography of King David, and a question that arises from it that I don't want to gloss over. There are millions upon millions of babies who enter eternity without ever reaching maturity. The weeping of mothers and fathers sheds rivers of tears in this regard. And maybe you have shed your own.

But in the aftermath of it, the question you're left with, it surfaces sooner or later, are where are they all now? Now in this text, David clearly states that he and his baby are going to have a reunion in the future. Some would say that David is merely talking about the grave, my baby died, I'm going to die too. It doesn't make much sense though, if that's his perspective, that he all of a sudden gets his appetite back. Just upon the knowledge that I'm going to die too, so I'll go eat now.

There's more to it than that, I think. Others would insist, and I would be with them, that David is saying that his baby is now in the father's house. This is where David said he'll end up eventually in that classic Psalm 23 in verse 6. He says, I'm going to dwell in the Lord's house forever.

He said, that's where I know I'm going. And so in order for me to be reunited with my baby, it will be there in the father's house. But that passage is clear enough or unclear enough to raise debate, and it opens the door to that most profound of questions, do babies go to heaven? What about the millions of miscarried babies annually? Shall we include aborted babies as well?

Certainly. Around one million a year in this country alone. So we're literally talking about millions of babies entering eternity annually. Since we as believers believe the record of Scripture and what it says about an eternal future, we have to be honest enough then to admit that either hell is receiving millions of babies every year, or heaven is receiving them, or maybe some of both.

And upon what would we base that? Pastor, I can tell you I have been involved in difficult situations, heart-wrenching moments in ministry, and those moments that I would say would be the most heart-wrenching of all are those moments when I've been called to a delivery room to hold a stillborn baby, or a baby born with a defect that brought about death within a matter of minutes. And I can tell you that at moments like those, the question that is greater than any other question, even beyond the why question, is did my baby go to heaven?

Now it might be easy to put our hope in something sentimental, something befitting hallmark, something optimistic to sort of soothe the heart, kind of ignore the issue, and you know in your own heart it hasn't been soothed, has it? What does God's word actually lead us to believe? Well, let me tell you at the outset of this marathon message, okay, that it doesn't allow us one neat verse, one easily interpreted packaged text that clarifies for us that the death of the preborn, the miscarried, the aborted, or even the mentally disabled, what we could call, and I believe would fit the category of perpetual children innocent, that they immediately are ushered into heaven. By the way, there isn't a verse that tells us they go to hell either, so you're going to have to study.

I'm going to give you some things that perhaps will simply launch you into a deeper, greater study, and I hope to steer you in the right direction. In order to answer the question biblically, we're going to have to compare a number of texts with each other, and we're going to have to tie theological truths together as well. To begin putting the biblical clues together, we need to actually answer several questions. The first question to deal with is not are preborn or infants going to heaven. The first question we have to answer is when does a baby's life actually begin, because then that would answer the question perhaps with the aborted or the miscarried.

When does a baby's life actually begin? Fortunately, we have a lot of information on that subject. In fact, turn to Psalm 139. You can leave Second Samuel.

I'll probably go back there in an hour or so to make a few comments. Psalm 139, David is going to take us via divine revelation into a mother's womb. He didn't have the sciences we have, but he did have the Spirit of God informing him of things we've only recently discovered. I want you to look down at verse 13. He says, for you formed my inward parts. You knitted me together in my mother's womb. Now, David pictures God sitting in a sewing machine or in his day a weaver's shuttle, and he's informing us that from the very moment of conception that God is involved in choosing the thread, so to speak, the color, the pattern, the style, and creatively weaving it together.

Oh, yeah, he's going to use stuff you gave him as a daddy or a mommy. They may look like you have your chin, your nose, whatever, but David is giving the creative working out of that pattern to the knowledge and purpose of God so that you are different from your mother and your father, those similar. Notice verse 14. I praise you, for I am fearfully and wonderfully crafted or made. The word David uses that's translated fearfully can be translated amazingly. We went into a much deeper study of this in our Sunday evening sessions in the Psalm.

Let me touch down on a few words. That word translated wonderfully, I am fearfully and wonderfully made, could be rendered uniquely. I am uniquely made, and so are you. You have a thumbprint nobody else on the planet has. God simply hasn't run out of ideas.

You are unique in that and a million ways more. And David is boasting in God, in his creator. He says, I am amazingly and uniquely created by God who formed even the tiniest thread of my being at the very moment of conception. God was there.

God was at work. Time magazine named Peter Singer to the list of 100 most influential people. You've probably heard his name. It's unfortunate he's on the list. But he's a professor of bioethics at Princeton University. And he was recently awarded by his home country of Australia for his work in bioethics and philosophy.

He's created a firestorm. If you've read any of his quotes, you know why. He has a rather brutal, and yet I must add, logical, ethical system. It's an ethical system devoid of any moral absolute without any creator God. And for this, our world applauds him. But he takes his evolutionary belief system where others would hold back. He forages on, and he literally says, delivers those chilling, practical conclusions, logical conclusions of an evolutionary worldview. For instance, he's gone on record, and he isn't alone, to say that simply because we're nothing more than highly evolved animals, it is morally acceptable for a baby to be put to death by its parents at birth. It should be left completely to the will of the parent or the guardian. By the way, when Paul was writing Romans to those Roman believers, their culture believed that it was legal for you to literally put your child to death or leave it out on the doorstep at night to be taken away by wild animals, the church of which began a process of rescuing and raising these babies.

We may get there ourselves one day. But again, why not? Animals abandon their young, you're an animal, you can too.

And you should be able to without any legal recourse against you. He's also publicly stated that parents ought to be allowed to kill their children up to one year of age if they evidence any kind of mental or physical disability. Now, of course, based on his evolutionary system of ethics, he really doesn't have any grounds to stop at age one, does he?

So he's not willing to go even further, but he stops at age one, which is inconsistent in his own thinking. But at any rate, he states that killing children specifically to harvest their organs for the benefit of older, physically ill children is morally acceptable. He simply argues with other philosophers, and it is true, as one stated, that without God, anything is permissible. A moral, no matter how chilling, argument. So if you forget the biblical declaration of a moral lawgiver, a creator, it is in fact simply the survival of the fittest animal.

Singer gets at that when he says this, and I quote him. We cannot base our ethics on the idea that human beings, follow this, are a special form of creation made in the image of God and singled out from all other animals. That's the evolutionary world view. In other words, forget the biblical declaration of origins and the concept of a creator God crafting you in the womb. In fact, forget the idea, as we're given in Genesis chapter one, that at the pinnacle of creation, at the pinnacle of creation, there is this eternal, unique, self-aware, spiritually capable, morally self-conscious human being, different from the animals. But if God had nothing to do with our creation anyway, and we're just animals too, our ethics can then change, and they are changing. In fact, Singer is effectively concluding that simply because of the fact that we are evolved animals, if we want to keep our young or not, if we want to kill our young, if we effectively want to feed their organs to other siblings, there isn't anything wrong with that. God had nothing to do with who you are.

You just got lucky enough to be at the top of the food chain and to have invented something that shoots bullets. Dr. Singer is not singing David's lyrics, is he? David the Singer is singing something entirely different. Look at verse 15. My frame was not hidden from you, God, when I was being made in secret. That Hebrew talks about the womb being the secret recess, that place where God develops. In fact, the word for frame refers to bones, our skeletal structure. He's saying here that God was also involved in determining our very skeletal structure. That means if you have big bones, and mine are getting bigger all the time, God had something to do with that.

Look further in verse 15. He says we are intricately woven or embroidered in the depths of the earth, a metaphor for the womb. God the Creator is at work then, not just in times past, but in every mother's womb, embroidering you by his creative design.

That same word for embroider is used by Moses to talk about the embroidering of the curtains that will hang in the temple. Understood properly then, every ability that you have, every disability that you have, was designed uniquely by God. We are uniquely crafted by God. So then in our own unique way, we will learn to trust in God for grace and for strength. We will learn to surrender to his sovereignty. We will learn to give him trust and honor and glory in your unique way that will be different in some ways than my way. We will depend upon God based on the uniqueness of his own crafting of our lives. And don't miss this, then we all uniquely are going to long for the blessing of the perfection of our glorified body in heaven. And we're going to praise God for areas of that perfected body that those around us won't even think about praising God for.

Because it's going to be unique to you and to me. Look at verse 16, Your eyes saw my unformed substance. In your book they were written, every one of them, the days that were formed for me before there was one of them. See, we tend to forget that a man and a woman don't create life.

We give ourselves way too much credit for that. We co-labor as secondary causes in the plan of God, in the bringing together of sperm and egg, but God actually is given the credit for creating from that life. For every creation of sperm and egg doesn't bring about life. God determines that. Conception is given to him for in his hand which is the power of life.

Acts chapter 17 goes into detail on that. David writes here, You ordain our days even before there is one of them. So the fact that there is something of life occurring at the moment of conception proves that the creative work of God goes back to that very moment that he indeed is involved and he is developing it according to his divine purposes. In fact, the word David chose here is loaded. He writes, You saw my unformed substance. That's one word in the Hebrew language.

It's a word to define something we know now David didn't know, but David under inspiration wrote about it. It's the Hebrew word that can be translated embryo. You saw, you were involved, you were crafting my embryo. Unformed substance.

So he's saying, God, I praise you for the way you designed even my embryo. Substance under formation in the womb. Substance not yet ready to live outside the womb. Substance alive yet developing. Life begins at conception and the ending of that is viewed by Scripture as death. And any death that occurs after the moment of conception is the death of a person.

A person. An eternal soul. I want you to listen to a couple of passages that talk about the eternal reach of God the Father and the references to the personhood of someone in the womb. Jeremiah is quoting God and God says to him, Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you. I knew all about you. Even before I started the process of forming you. Before you were born, I sanctified you. I set you apart. I had a purpose for you that was going to go beyond conception and birth into your life.

It's all planned. I formed you. Personal pronouns.

I knew you. Before you were born, I sanctified you. The Lord did not view Jeremiah as some lump of impersonal tissue in the womb. Some anonymous, unliving appendage to a mother's body. A fetus that really wasn't anything more than a mass of tissue. No, in the womb, both Jeremiah and David are saying God is involved with a living person.

Even in its unformed substance. David can't be any clearer. In fact, God sees you, by the way, already as perfectly glorified. He sees you already, from the perspective of eternity, already seated with Christ in the heavenlies. You are already, in the mind of God, seated in the heavenlies. You don't feel like you're seated in the heavenlies right now.

You think you're seated in the stuffy auditorium. But in the mind of God, from the perspective of eternity, he already knows in his purposes that you will one day, and in fact in his mind, already are seated there. By the way, that's a wonderful doctrine of security of your salvation. You're already there.

You're already there. But here's the staggering truth then. One author, John MacArthur, has written a wonderful little commentary on this subject. He says this, Life begins then by the will and power of a creator God. Every person then conceived is a God-created, God-loved person with a God-given purpose and destiny. Now that's staggering in its implications when you think about what the Scriptures have said in this conclusion. What that means is then, for millions upon millions of pre-born, miscarried infants, God's purpose for their lives on earth, so to speak, in the mystery of his sovereign will was completed. Whether it was a matter of moments, seconds, minutes, hours, weeks, months.

Completed. Which means then that God's purpose is in destiny for your child perhaps, for your child's life was fulfilled perfectly. Even if that child died, the reality of God's purposes for that person are literally staggering to consider when you think about the context of an eternal purpose for your life and mine and even these babies.

So question number one. When does life begin? It begins at the moment of a God-empowered, God-designed, God-ordained, God-purposed conception. Apart from that, life cannot begin. It's in the power of God's hand.

Let me answer another question. Does every person live forever? Now the short answer is yes. Being created in the image of God means, among other things, that we have been created eternal. Once life begins, we understand that at conception, it never ends. So the critical question isn't so much will you live forever, it's where will you live forever, right?

It isn't will you live. In fact, everybody on the planet intuitively knows that's true. They were created, Ecclesiastes 3 and 11 says, with eternity implanted in their heart. There's a knowledge and understanding this isn't all there is.

If they're honest enough, they'll admit it. Now the reason the question about babies is such a big issue for people inside the church and outside any religious system is because the law of God has been implanted on their hearts and they know there's more out there beyond this brief life as we know it. Stephen has much more to cover in this message, but we need to stop here and resume tomorrow. You've tuned in to Wisdom for the Heart with Pastor Stephen Davey.

This message is entitled, Do Babies Really Go to Heaven When They Die? And it's part of Stephen's series on the life of King David. Last month, we offered Stephen's eBook on this topic as our free resource of the month.

If you missed it, it's still available to you to download today. If you go to our website, we have a page where we offer a free resource each month. The website is wisdomonline.org forward slash offer. That's wisdomonline.org forward slash offer.

And if you forget that, just go to our homepage and there's a link there. Even though we have a new offer this month, the link to this eBook is still there. The eBook is called, Do Babies Really Go to Heaven When They Die? That eBook is free in our store right now. I encourage you to share that link with anyone who has suffered the loss of a child. We'll be back tomorrow with the conclusion to this message. Join us then here on Wisdom for the Heart.