Christ and Babies
Do babies who die in infancy go directly to
Heaven, as genuine believers do? Or, do they go to develop among the
lost, to live on as natural sinners, to choose only evil and its consequences fforever? Or, are they annihilated by
Divine decree, as creatures that have no credit by which they are
entitled to salvation and yet not guilty of knowingly rejecting God and right
in favour of sin and Satan? This is a big
and dangerous subject, yet one that needs consideration, at least to try to
counter some lines of teaching that we are sure are wrong.
Whenever and however one tries too present the truth about the absolute,
infinite and eternal authority and control of God as
Sovereign over all things, all space and at all times, he
gets into trouble and invites weird and wonderful contradictions and
restrictive theories. Usually, these include attempts to revamp God, to set
Godhood against Godhood, by pleading what people
perceive to be His love and mercy against His severity and justice. This attitude
sets His work as Creator against His right to rule and pleads the silence of
God against the revelations He has given. Such evil pride tries to argue from
the fact that God has given wonderful privileges in grace to deny or reduce the
rights He has reserved for Himself. If human rebels cannot find seemingly consistent Scriptures that show,
to their own satisfaction, that creatures can and do cramp and confine
their Creator, they concoct foolosophies, whereby they try to make out that Jehovaah allowed for a lot of experiments and
fruitless failures in His plans and
hopes; but arranged alibis to cover His mistakes and protect Himself against man's withering criticism. Such is the
argument that the only way that God can justify Himself for allowing
tens of millions of human infants to be born and die in babyhood is to exterminatte them, without their having either
opportunity for good or occasion for personal guilt.
If we speak or write about God ssovereignty electing or choosing some
entirely unworthy sinners unto salvation — a salvation in which, among
other mysterious works of grace, He
forcefully and righteously turns a penitent man against his own sinful nature and by which He makes an imported
disposition to adopt a murderous or kind of suicidal attitude toward his own
sinful being, then we find folks, say, 'Oh yes, but that is alright, since we are exercising our new selves
against our old selves. It is all right for us to follow Paul and die
daily, or to crucify our old man, so long as we have a say in how and why it is
done. Let us assert authority upon our own evils; but do not tell us that God
is accountable for this, or for allowing others to do otherwise with the devil in thhemselves. The trouble comes when we
point to history, Scripture and experience, all of which show clearly
that God did and still does discriminate
between different people, with eternally diverse results. He did not commit Himself to establish eternal and infinite credit
for all, by giving all an equal amount of benefit from the imputed
righteousness of His Son. He did not choose to use His Holy Spirit and the
essential impulses of a new nature to turn every man against his ed
disposition, but chose to leave a sizable segment of humanity to go on eternally
pursuing the way and consequences of their own choosing. God has not chosen to tell us all the reasons why He saw fit
to make some vessels of wrath. He does say in Romans 9 that they were
designed to give occasion for the exhibition of
His power and the display of one dimension of His authority, as the Divine
Potter. He does show us many pictures
of degenerate humans here, in the Hades of the present state of things and in previews of what the
unsaved will be like, between the time of the resurrection of all and the ppoint at which all fallen angels and all
unregenerate humans will go from the
Judgement to the Pit, as well as some descriptions of their ever-worsening state in the eternal future. He
does show that they do not repent in Hades, but will only argue and fight aggainst Him, now and when they all join
before the public Judgement where
they will be forced to give account of their privileges and attitudes
while here on Earth and at the Judgement. (See Matt. 25:24-46; Matt. 16:27; 2 Cor. 5:10; John 5:28 & 29; Heb. 2:2
& 3; Rev. 14:9-11; Rev. 16:1-11 and vs. 21; Rev. 18:1-19; Rev. 22:11
and Luke 16:19-31). Making the passage in Luke 16 to speak as a parable does noot soften the facts on this point by
one, slightest degree, since Jesus' parables are all based on actual
realities and the reality is a picture of a
man in hopeless torment, who does not repent or ask for deliverance, but who
goes on asserting his own ideas and
claiming rights over God and His people that he did not deserve. They never ask to be made Christ-like or like regenerate believers. They
only get worse and worse and try even harder to turn God and His people
and resources to selfish and devilish
misuse.
Too many of us as Christians all too frequently
show that we do not appreciate God's sanctifying plan for us either. Too often, our
resistance to God's standards suggests a
kinship with those, dear falsifiers of facts, when we do not properly rejoice at
the wonderful mystery of God's plan and work with respect to ourselves. Why did
He allow you to be born in sin and shapen in iniquity? Why did He permit you to
foster sinful appetites and develop enslaving habits for years and then send
His almighty Holy Spirit to convict and discomfit you with torturesome barbs of
truth, until you fell in defeat and started praying against your own, normal
disposition? Why were you made to beg for
an alien, new nature to be given you, that the Spirit of holiness take
over within you, to challenge and break the control of carnality or normality
within you? These are the very experiences that natural depravity never desires or accepts with tolerance or joy. Those
who are natural will endure any amount of
anguish here in order to cling to this
body of sin and will face anything in Hades or
Gehenna, so long as they can still blaspheme and have something of their own way. The thought of unconditional surrender to
the carrying out of the undisclosed details
of the will of God in their lives, the iidea of agreeing to the necessary
functions of true faith, is more
repulsive to them than any perceivable realities of ongoing pursuit of sin and its consequences.
Abuses Against God's Silence.
This same anti-sovereign sinfulness seizes upon the fact that God
has told us relatively little about children who die in infancy.
His silence is seen as a kind of vacuum into
which they run with gruesome and ghastly assumptions and distortions of
what they imagine others believe. Confirmed annihilationists have a special eagerness to prove that extermination of such
humans is the only course open to God, since
He has not given any clear proof texts, by which to support the idea that they were
redeemed by the sacrifice of Christ. I would hardly expect God to give alibis to abortionist murderers, by writing infallible
statements that such craven killers can understand and that say plainly,
"All babies that die by any means and all imbeciles are sure of
places in Heaven." They would take that as a license to kill, as surely as
they use ed concepts about His love as excuses for other sins.
Is God really as silent as these would like to make out on this topic?
The generality of the resurrection scriptures certainly
assert that ALL SHALL BE RAISED AGAIN AT THE LAST DAY. See Daniel 12:2
"And many of them that sleep in the dust of
the earth shall awake, some to everlasting life, and some to shame and
everlasting contempt. John 5:28 & 29, "Marvel not at this: for
the hour is coming, in which all that are in the graves shall hear his voice,
And shall come forth; they that have done good, unto the resurrection of life;
and they that have done evil, unto the resurrection of damnation." Acts.
24:15, "And have hope toward God, which they themselves also allow, that therre shall be a resurrection of the dead,
both of the just and unjust." Rev. 20:13-15, "And the sea gave
up the dead which were in it; and death and
hell delivered up the dead which were in them: and they were judged every man
according to their works. And death and hell were cast into the lake of fire. This is the second death. And whosoever was not
found written in the book of life was
cast into the lake of fire." If
teachers of the theory of conditional immortality are right, if, as they say, there is no personal existence
for anyone after the breath leaves the body, if each individual returns as he
was, so far as growth in mental, emotional
or spiritual development are concerned, and if all babies are to be annihilated
because they were born as extensions of Adam's guilt and nature and
never lived to hear the Gospel and claim or rreject the work and merits of Christ,
why rise again? They have no record of choosing darkness rather than
light, of accumulated guilt either from omission of right or commission of
wrong. To see them raised as underdeveloped
infants and dashed to the incinerator of eternal fire can hardly make for
good to any parents, either among the sheep or the goats of Matthew 25. The
relative silence of God about the future of babies leaves us with some
unanswered questions, but it must not be
used as an excuse for overturning plain scriptures about the
universality of the final resurrection.
The plain teaching of John 3:17-19 must have
some consideration in connection with this theme. It says that "For
God sent not his Son into the world to condemn the world; but that the world thhrough him might be saved. He that
believeth on him is not condemned: but he that believeth not is
condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten
Son of God. And this is the condemnation,
that light is come into the world, and men loved darkness rather than light,
because their deeds were evil." This places the blame for condemnation on deliberate rejection of light and personal
preference for darkness. Take this with the teachings found in the symbolic llanguage of John 15:1-6, about why some
branches that originated in Christ
(See Acts 17:28 & 29) and were cut off, gathered with their own rejected
kind and burned, because they did not abide in Christ; and study further the parallel comments about names deleted from the
symbolic Book of Life and we see clearly that personal responsibility
accounts for rejection and damnation. (See Rev. 3:5, and Rev. 22:19) Since Christ wass really the second Adam, since the
damning sin is personal rejection of Christ and refusal to bear fruit or
overcome by His grace, you are surely
stretching your charges, if you identify babies with these crimes and insist that
they derived no benefit whatsoever from Christ's grace, His sacrifice or His
Priesthood and were just born to burn.
I cannot reconcile this gruesome spectre
with the Lord Jesus' tender interest in children and His
jealous protection of them, as seen in Matthew 19:14; Mark 10:14; and Matthew 18:1-6, as well as veerses 10-14. If children who die in
infancy were born to die, to rot, to rise, to burn to extinction, when did others
become the objects of angels' concern and
ministry? If the redemptive work of Christ took account of them and if they were born to grow and glow in Heaven,
is the problem of instilling faith and responsiveness in them any
greater than it is in adulthood? Will they respond to their heavenly Father
less readily than they take to their earthly parents?
If babies are
born to burn, if they do not grow up and trust in Christ, what did David
expect, when he comforted his heart with the assurance that his infant would
not return to him, his sinful father; but that he, as a penitent parent, would go to him? (See 2 Sam. 12:23). If annihilationists are right, what good would it do for David to go in complete unconsciousness to
the grave with the dust from his little boy, or to rise at the future resurrection, to see that God did nothing but restore him for
a fiery end and complete extermination? But if old faith is
better than so-called, "new insights,"
and if God's whole redemptive programme, from election in eternity past unto complete transformation into Christ's
likeness, in eternity yet to be, if its benefits all were procured and assured
for all except the chronic and deliberate rejecters of saving light, which God
saw fit to leave to themselves, then David had valid reason for blessed hope,
based upon God's work in his child and the
Heaven-wrought conformity of his character to God's Model, the Lord Jesus.
The faith that the
best of God's most developed saints will
exercise from the moment they see
Christ as He is, will be infinitely
better than the best that any show now. The changes we all need and must experience
before we can be at home with God are as great or perhaps greater than a
newly-born baby would require to make it
presentable to Heaven's school. If the proof texts that depict babies going to
Heaven are pleasingly few to the annihilationist, the pictures of God denying
them any rights to life
or of His pitching them into the
place of Satan's punishment to gasp and writhe until their resurrected beings peerish, are fewer still. If His silence
justified your lurid forecasts, then
your appreciation of the redemptive work of Christ and of the Father's
responses to it are not very attractively commensurate with His
suffering nor with the many tender expressions of love for children,
such as we have given already or as
we have in Psalm 127:3 & 4; Isaiah 40:11; Acts 2:39; Ephesians 6:4 and Colossians
3:21.
Perhaps this is as good a place as any to
repeat a word about God and His right to exercise His power to keep secrets.
There is no reason why God should tell us anything about how He planned for babies
who were not assigned to places of continuing privileges, or how He will
eternally satisfy Christ in return for what He did and does or will do on their behalf.
Some criticize inquisitive speculators who insist that He has given them
insights and previews about the time of Christ's return, but we may show exactly the same spirit and
impertinence by impudently filling in blanks in His revelations about
other matters. The smallness of our concepts about God and the range of His Kingship rights is often shown by
unworthy assumptions or implications that suggest that His clear
revelations and our knowledge are safe measurements of His plans or areas of
control. Your God is much too small if He fits into either of these frames. He gives knowledge about what we need
to know for our salvation, sanctification
and services, but demands that faith leave other details for Him to work
out as He pleases. We do not need to preach to infants or to work to extract
them from purgatory or limbo, so respectful faith looks with reverence on truth
which may apply to this mystery, but we must do so with caution and readiness to rejoice in unseen wonders, when
grace reveals what our poor minds could not imagine. His final revelatioon about infants, imbeciles and
reprobates will show bigger, wiser and better features in His plan and
finer perfections in His character than we ever dreamed of. Until then, may He
save us from shriveling speculators and
keep us in a state of glad anticipation of better views of His altogether
glorious person and plans.
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