Straight to the Heart

Whoever first thought to call easy tasks “child’s play” clearly didn’t have any children themselves. Kids ask the toughest questions and they expect us to have answers.

At Queens Road Church, we’re spending the six summer Sundays trying to answer the toughest questions which our children have told us they would like to pose to God. I expected their questions to be quite easy to answer, but instead they have created one of our most challenging sermon series ever. This morning I tried to tackle the question, “Do Babies and Children Who Die Go to Heaven?” Here is an outline of the reply which I gave:-

1. THE QUESTION MARK

God has chosen not to give us a full answer to this question in the Bible. There’s a very good reason why. In the past 2,000 years, wicked people have done all kinds of unspeakable things in the name of religion. Torture, murder, even genocide in the name of God. The Roman poet Lucretius was right when he said that “Religion can prompt such evil deeds in people.”

God knows the human heart. Imagine what parents might have done throughout history if they believed that a child who died before a certain age was assured a place in heaven? Can you imagine parents in the Middle Ages permitting their children to live into adulthood if they truly believed there was a cast-iron guarantee of salvation to any of their offspring who died young? Even this week I found a blog which asked the question “If babies go to heaven when they die, then why is abortion wrong?”  We ought to be glad that God has left us with a question mark.

2. THE GOOD NEWS

That said, God has given us some great clues in the Bible which can offer great hope to those of us who have lost a child or a sibling whilst young. One of my close friends miscarried her baby last month, and it was clues such as these which gave her and her husband hope in the midst of tragedy.

God starts by making it very clear in the Bible that we do NOT have any reason to hope that babies and children who die go to heaven simply because they are too young to sin. David writes in Psalm 51:5 that “I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me,” and again in Psalm 58:3 that “from birth the wicked go astray; from the womb they are wayward and speak lies.” Paul says the same and more in the book of Romans.

Appropriately, then it is David who then takes our hand to lead us on in our journey to real reasons for hope. He himself lost a baby son when he was only a few days old, and worked these issues through in the furnace of suffering. “I will go to him,” he prophesied in 2 Samuel 12:23, and when did so he was not merely speaking greeting-card platitudes. When an older, more obviously rebellious son died several years later, he grieved in 2 Samuel 18:33, “O my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you!” What had David learned about salvation which gave him hope at the graveside of his baby but not at the news that his adult son had died?

David delighted in the Law of Moses, the much-neglected first five books of the Old Testament. Where others skim-read them, David read slowly, and he found in them the hope which he needed in his grief. He read the words of God to the adults who failed to trust him at the border of the Promised Land in Deuteronomy 1:35-39 -“Not a man of this evil generation shall see the good land I swore to give to your forefathers, except … the little ones that you said would be taken captive, YOUR CHILDREN WHO DO NOT YET KNOW GOOD FROM BAD - they will enter the land.” Theologians sometimes refer to this ability to know good from bad as reaching the ‘age of discretion’. Isaiah 7:15 talks in the same way about the moment for a child “when he knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right.”

3. THE GOSPEL EXAMPLE

Does this therefore mean that all babies and young children go to heaven if they die? Not necessarily. The Bible gives us a clue as to how they can be saved from their sin through the teaching of Jesus in Mark chapter 2.

Jesus was healing the sick at Capernaum. There is a paralysed man whose friends want him to be healed too. We cannot know for sure whether he also had some mental disability, but the gospel-writers agree that he played a non-speaking role. His friends recognise that he needs Jesus the Saviour, and his friends dig a hole in the roof where Jesus’ healing meeting is taking place. His friends lower him down to Jesus on a stretcher, and the gospel-writers all agree that it was “when Jesus saw THEIR [ie his friends’] faith, he said to the paralytic, ‘Son, your sins are forgiven.’” Jesus went on to heal the man, but don’t miss the importance of what happened before. Jesus looked at a weak and helpless individual and forgave him because of his friends’ faith on his behalf. Like young children, he believed whatever those closest to him told him was true. Because of their faith, he was brought to the feet of Jesus, the only one who could save him. Because of their faith, he was forgiven, like any baby or child who is brought to Jesus too.

4. THE GOD OF CHILDREN

One of the reasons that we struggle with this question is that deep down we believe that babies are too unspiritual to interact with God. That was the mistake which the disciples made in Luke 18:15-17, a mistake for which Jesus rebuked them in their pride. It is only because we underestimate the depths to which God needs to stoop to interact with the most intelligent of adults that we think he has any problem stooping a tiny bit lower to interact with a baby. In fact, Scripture tells us that he does it all the time.

David praised God in Psalm 8:2 literally that “Out of the mouth of suckling babies and breast-feeding infants, you have ordained praise.” We read in Luke 1:15 that even when John the Baptist was an unborn foetus, he was “filled with the Holy Spirit, even from his mother’s womb.” God has no problem interacting with embryos, zygotes, babies and toddlers - what matters is whether their parents bring them to God with the same faith as the paralysed man’s friends in Capernaum.

5. THE CHALLENGE

I have three children, aged one, four and five. Each one of them demonstrates a different way in which we should respond to God’s answer to this great question in Scripture:-

My one-year-old reminds us that we need to trust God with his question mark. Should - perish the thought - anything happen to her, he has given me enough grounds in the Bible to trust him that her eternal destiny is secure. If David could shape the world of his little breast-feeding son in a Godward direction; if Elizabeth and Zechariah could pray such prayers over their foetus that he responded to God whilst still in the womb; if such godly parenting gave David full assurance as he buried his baby - then I can have a similar faith too if I lead my own family in the same way as them.

My four-year-old reminds me that we therefore need to lead. The words of a parent carry such weight with very young children that I could literally tell my son that the sky is pink and he would trust me that whatever I say is true. Do I take time, therefore, to teach him the basics of the Gospel? Do I wear my faith on my sleeve enough in my household that my faith brings him daily to the feet of Jesus the Saviour? What do my words and my lifestyle proclaim about God, and about sin and repentance through Jesus’ death and resurrection? When I remember that the helpless paralysed man was forgiven through the faith of those who brought him to Jesus, it makes me pay attention to the faith I pass on to my dependent little four-year-old.

My five-year-old reminds me that children need to act. The Bible does not tell us when a child reaches the ‘age of discretion’, but since it tells us that it happens when a child “knows enough to reject the wrong and choose the right,” I have to assume that it arrives very soon these days. When I watch my five-year-old making choices every day, I realise that I can’t afford to wait until his teenage years to tell him that it’s time for him to respond to the Gospel in his own right instead of mine. I need to challenge him to confess his sin and to respond to the Gospel of Jesus today.

That’s how I ended my answer this morning, with a challenge to children and parents to respond. The truth is, if a child is old enough to ask this question then they have passed the age at which they can hide behind their parents’ faith on Judgment Day. Children and their parents must treat with deadly urgency the message that God himself lost a Son to an untimely death so that people of any age can be saved and spend eternity with him. The Son who conquered death now stands in risen glory and urges us to “Let the little children come to me.”

Next week, I will try to answer another child’s question: “Why Do Such Bad Things Happen to Good People?”