0:00  
So why do Christians believe that babies go to heaven? That's the topic of today's episode. Might be a heavy one, but we're glad you're here. It's the Why do Christians podcast. Hey, welcome to the show. My name is Mark dickey. I host the afternoon show on the bridge radio station. I've got both co hosts today. Pastor Bert Miller, hey and Pastor Josh dupisch, hey, it's good to see you guys. Hey, before we jump into the topic, I have really important

0:32  
news to tell.

0:34  
Okay, so I was looking at the podcast statistics, because I get, like, a weekly report and there's, like, loose numbers, if you remember, we did the like, the 50 states, Alaskan adventure challenge, yeah. How can I forget? I know, what is there? What a thrill, what a thrill that we've been listening to in all 50 states. I noticed a strange trend. Though. Last month, we had like, 200 extra listens than normal. And I was like, Where is this coming from? I've traced where it's coming from bots.

1:09  
It's like, where?

1:11  
Or something good,

1:12  
yeah, yeah. Great.

1:15  
Germany. No. Like, for some reason, our Holy Spirit series, is just really hitting it off in Germany. The Germans

1:25  
love them some Holy Spirit, yeah. And I obviously by the Christians

1:28  
podcast, okay? And I just, I wonder how good, if you're German listening to this, you got to let us know how Bert did on that accent. Reckon, see Deutsch Guten Tag, by the way, but if you are listening to our podcast, I'm just wondering if there's a church somewhere that maybe found our podcast, and maybe there's a small group and they're going through it to get I don't know. I want to know the story.

1:55  
Maybe people were on a missions trip to Germany, got bored, said, let me find an oddly specific podcast in America, yeah, to remind me of home, maybe.

2:04  
Okay, maybe. So, if you are from Germany and you're listening and watching this, let us know. I need to know the story. Why are there hundreds of downloads all of a sudden from Germany, unless it's bots, German.

2:17  
Bots German. But they're incredibly efficient.

2:20  
Okay, yeah. Well, in a few episodes ago, the topic for today's episode got brought up. We were talking about heaven and the concept of of salvation. And I think it was like we were talking about the point of salvation, like, when do you know you're saved? How do you know you're saved? And the topic gets a little little dicey, a little uncomfortable, when it comes to infants or babies. You know, when someone who isn't capable of making a decision for Christ and and receiving salvation, that eternity with God, and so we're going to try and unpack that the best we can, right?

3:05  
Yeah, yeah, I think so.

3:06  
Because I would say this is, I don't know if debatable is the right way to describe it, but there isn't a clear, clear, clear answer in Scripture, right? Maybe,

3:20  
right. So I guess these are one of the things you want to say. You want to be careful not to say much where the Bible says little, yeah, yeah, not over promise not to put words in God's mouth. But at the same time, we have a big picture, like God has really revealed Himself in Jesus. And so from that, we can kind of pull out some ideas of what potential areas God would move in, even though we can't specifically say this is finally the case, but we could be like knowing him, he, he appears to go down this general road. And so we can kind of have that, that kind of view, or that kind of expectation.

4:04  
So you're saying, like in we want to not make stuff up, but in areas where there, where there are perhaps gaps, we don't want to fill them in. And yet, there are things revealed in God's character and create that can create trust rather than fear.

4:19  
Absolutely, yeah,

4:21  
and also, we just want you to know that, if you are listening or watching this episode, maybe you're grieving right now, maybe, maybe there's a child or someone that you knew years ago, and maybe you're just you're searching for answers, just know that their hearts are with you, and this is a really heavy topic, and so we're going to do our best to help you find answers and see what the Bible has to say about the topic. So is that where we should start? Yeah, sure.

4:53  
Yeah. I mean, the difficulty is when it comes to Scripture, if you're. Looking for a verse or passage that goes, Yes, infants go to heaven or no, they don't. Said verse does not exist. There are passages where you could maybe glean something, but it's tough to do that. So for instance, Second Samuel, 1223, there's a story where David, his infant son, dies, and David says, I he won't be with me. I will go to him. And so you could take that as like a you know, he is in the presence of the Lord and with God. When I die, I'll be with him. But you can also take it as one day I also will die. So it's not the most clear. And I think that's generally what you find. You can find things about development and, you know, knowing right and wrong or not knowing right and wrong, and that's why things like Christians, theologians and leaders have developed terms like the age of accountability, like when is a person knows what they need to know in order to receive or reject Christ. That term also is not in the Bible. It develops in Christian history in response to different theology, and we can talk about that later on. I think when we're just going biblically, the thing I would glean would be all right, God's heart towards children is shown. You can think about in Matthew 19, verse 14, Jesus says, like, Let the little children come to Me, for such is the kingdom of heaven. So, again, is that about salvation? No, it shows who God is as a person. So I say that's a very long winded way to say. You know, if we were to summarize, what does the Scripture say about the subject? The answer is not much. But I don't think that should put us in a place of hopelessness, because what we learn about the character of God is that he's just he's good. He clearly cares about the little ones. And if I were to just go get the little I would say in the scope of eternity, everyone will end up exactly where they should, right, so within God's goodness and care, I think there's a lot of reason to believe that all of them are going to be fine, but I don't have anything biblically that says definitively yes or no.

7:20  
Trying to reverse engineer what you just said. If there was a way to guarantee a shot a baby, let's, let's just say a baby going to heaven, right? What would that do to that if the baby lived to be 100 years old, right? Like, is that, you know? Like, are you just pre saved? So this is a Does that make sense? Yeah.

7:46  
So this is actually why the conversation in theology took the term that it or the term that it did, and we kind of unpack that, because that's how you get the answer to that question, right? So, Josh, you have a thought there. I'm sorry.

8:00  
No, no, go for it. Okay, I'm interested.

8:03  
In here. Okay, so earliest I could find in terms of influential Christian thought, where the question even comes up, like, what about infants who are, aren't baptized, or aren't, have not made a profession of faith, shows up in a guy in the in 400 years after the Bible is written guy named St Augustine, all right, and Augustine, he's an influential Western Christian thinker. We owe a lot of the theology that that we have come to, not that he originated, but he articulated in a way that that was fleshed out so that we could understand like we owe a lot to Augustine. However, he was not inerrant. And I think in this regard, he got it really wrong. And so what Augustine does, and he says this in a few places in his writings, because he'll respond to different controversies, and in Augustine's day, and within his scope of thinking, there is the belief of salvation being intrinsically linked with baptism, that is to say, or like, unless you're baptized, you're not saved. That's just been as the mark of God washing away your sin and and how people take that today and what they do, that's a whole different, uh, conversation, but that's, that's what he's responding to. And so because of that, because he's responding to this idea of like, okay, well, what happens then to people who can't be baptized? I see like he's responding to a specific movie. He brings that to the idea of children, and he says this. He says, I'll give this from it's called from Enchiridion on faith, hope and love, chapter 93 he says, As for infants who are certainly unable to believe with the heart unto righteousness, nor to make confession with the mouth unto salvation. Goes on. He says, it's an established fact that they are not exempt from the original sin, and they cannot have life unless they be born again in Christ, basically saying, Listen, everybody who's ever lived is born with sin. You're born with. Sinful nature rebelling against God. And so unless you receive Christ, and He washes that away, it's not going to go anywhere. That's at his thought. So later, he'll write, this is from letter 166 to Jerome. He says, therefore it might be rightly said that little ones departing this life without the Sacrament of Baptism will be involved in the mildest condemnation of all.

10:23  
Yeah, what does that mean?

10:25  
I think, I think he got really wrong there. What he's saying is that there are different, like, so he has this belief of hell, but also, like, Limbo, Purgatory. So basically, what he's saying is, all right, they're not going to heaven, but like the the mildest form of the the afterlife, apart from heaven, is where they're going to go. Does the Scripture teach that? No, absolutely not. I think he was very wrong there, but, but he's but he's getting there from this place of just trying to rationalize things out. So time goes on and you get people who are the Protestant reformers right, like guys like John Calvin, Martin Luther, and they respond to a lot of things, a lot of abuses in the church, but also years of tradition being equated with scripture,

11:17  
right, right is so this, just this reminds me of what we see with the Pharisees, where they have the law, but then they start making laws Yes, to help them better keep the law. And then they build laws on those laws, and now they're following something that God didn't ever

11:35  
say, Yeah, and just like for the sake of sensitivity. So as a Protestant, I believe, obviously the traditions are not on par with scripture. Par with scripture. You know, notably, the Roman Catholic Church has a view of their traditions being the only true interpretation of Scripture. So we're going to view traditions in church history very, very differently, though. Okay, okay, but regardless, Augustine says this thing, and then years and years and years later, more than 1000 years later, you have a guy named John Calvin, for instance, like one of the reformers, and he addresses this idea, and he says this in this is from the institutes. He says, The Lord, if it be his will, can regenerate infants without the external means, meaning, no, no, we don't. Has nothing to do with what like, what people do. It's what God chooses to do in the person. And so you know, if you have an infant who's not baptized, God can save them even if they don't profess the things that we know people should do in the living out of salvation. And so, you know, like time just kind of starts to go on, and different Protestant thinkers will start to develop this idea of the age of accountability and responding. And those who either unable to articulate or understand the gospel, they're not required to do so to be saved, because God can save from his own kindness in places where people don't have an opportunity to accept or reject Christ. So that's and that's where I would lean,

13:11  
yeah, I think, I think that's where I would go to. I mean, you have some scriptures, or it's actually a few stories. You have David when he said in Psalms 22 you made me trust you at my mother's upon my upon my mother's chest. You have King Josiah, who's like, as a child, is already pursuing the will of God. You have John the Baptist, who in the womb is responding, that's your point. Good point. Yeah. And then so you're like, it's exactly as Bird says, The Spirit of God works in you. And it's, it is a gift where He enables a baby in the womb to trust in the Lord. And that's, that's what salvation is in whatever way they can Yeah, yeah. And that's what we're saying. They don't need to articulate the odds your doctrine. They need to trust in the Lord. And trust comes in various forms, especially even as a baby in the womb, trusting their parents, trusting in the Lord. Yeah, I would say. I would agree on that totally.

14:12  
So what I'm hearing is it's out of our hands.

14:17  
I mean, yes, but that doesn't mean it going to a place of fear. Okay, so it's out of our hands. I mean, everything's out of our hands, but there is enough, I think, scripturally and just logically, to say now I can trust in the goodness of God here, right? That God doesn't have a hidden set of criteria by which he judges that we live in fear of, and said he's fair and he's right, and he's good and fair in the sense of gracious, like he's not going if a person lacks the ability to do something, he's not going to require that of them. He will require obedience within where they are. Think about like Romans chapter one. There's like when Paul. Talking about the the truth of God revealed in creation. Right? He talks about people who said, like, you know, like they though what is known of God was observable to them in creation. They they still chose to rebel and accept idols, right? He's talking about like the general fallenness of humanity. But even there, he said, Look, here's what they could see, and they disobeyed it. Said that, I think you do see scripture that this idea of like, God knows how to judge rightly, and what that means, by the way, is that he's incredibly gracious and kind. And so for me, that, again, puts me in a place of going, like, I trust that little one soul to the Lord,

15:40  
yeah, yeah. I think too, we can go from, like, the where, like someone like Augustine was coming from, where, I think one of the things he wanted to do was, like, just explain how serious sin sin is and how Adam's guilt is, like, passed on to us. And so there is a sense that Adam, first father is guilty of sin, and we inherit it. All the cost involved with that, right? But with kids, it's a bit, it's a bit different. I mean, I'm sure, if you agree with that theology, they they've inherited sin, but they don't yet have their own personal sin. They've, they've yet to take, in a sense, take ownership of it, right? But the gospel is clear in the sense that Adam sin and his guilt, you could say, is transferred to us, and we play, we play that out in our lives. But also, there's been another transfer that Christ's righteousness is now transferred to us and so and so. We couldn't say that God, out of his kindness, is not somehow overlooking kids debt that they owe due to Adam's sin. Right? He's He's not just blindly being like, oh, forget all the salvation thing. No, he has made away, even for babies, that the righteousness of Jesus is imparted to us, is given to us, not from work that we do, but from the graciousness of God. And so in that sense, then, for anyone who's like, theologically, like, well, but there's still death, there's still, yeah, yep, there is, but there's still also this righteousness that comes from Jesus that's transferred to us and and that's how we're saved. And so babies, even coming to God and receiving heaven, will, will we won't get up there and be like, oh, there's a baby up here. They got up here because they were a baby. Like, no, they got up here because of Jesus. Like, the one who died has transferred his goodness unto them and brought them into heaven with us, like that, there's not going to be a human up there who didn't trust and rely and deeply believe in Christ. And here's the good news, that's the working of the person who says, Don't hinder children coming to me like, that's the person who said, no, no, you you guys sit out like I want them. That's that's from the person who laid hands on them and blessed them like who didn't know his theology. That's from the person when he rode on a donkey they sung praise to Him and and they said, stop them. He's like, No, that's

18:23  
so good like that.

18:24  
So I'm gonna trust that that guy, this Christ, is also gonna impart and bring those little kids to him too.

18:36  
Wow. Well, I can't help but think about, you know, the kinds of people who are probably listening to this episode, you know, of all the episodes they could have clicked on. You know, this is, this is the one that drew them. And maybe there's someone who's just genuinely curious, or, you know, what, what? What do these guys think about this, but I can't help but think of of the mom who lost a child. Sure you know whether it was a young child or a pregnancy that didn't go well, what would you say to them?

19:17  
A few things. One, I would say that I'm sorry for your loss. And you know, our hearts go out to you. Number two, I would say that God hates death more than you do, right? So what it took for him to purchase victory over death was the death of his own son. And God has been in the process of undoing death as an effect of the Fallen creation. Through Christ for the last 2000 years, one day there will come a day. It when He will wipe every tear from our eyes, and all of this will be done, the gap that you are experiencing now, the missing your child, the longing, the mourning, it is not forever. Just hang on. Know that the Lord is close. He loves you. He is with you. And I would tell you this as well, that God loved and loves your child more than you do, and that doesn't mean that he is okay with what happened at all, like at all, hence the cross, hence Christ, but at the same time, you can trust Him with their fate, because of the stuff that Josh is just saying right there, in terms of his character and who He has revealed Himself to be. And so I would say that your child is in exactly the right hands, and you don't need to go through life living in fear of their their destiny eternally, because God is good. That's what I would say.

21:23  
I you raised a question for me when you said that you know that God doesn't, doesn't like, he hates. What happened? Is that a reference to just the fact that we're in a fallen world? Yeah, and that bad things happen and and just that we can think, okay, if a bad thing happened, God must be responsible, because why would God let this happen? But that's not the case. Not always the case.

21:49  
Yeah, I think so. The story of the Bible is God is creator and King of the universe. Our first parents rebelled against Him, rejected his way in creation. As a result, creation broke meaning, sin, death, wickedness, the domain of Satan, pain, suffering, all these things entered into the world that were not present at creation. And so God brought forth the people, ancient Israel, and through them, he brought Christ, who is the true Israel, and Christ lived for us the life that we've not lived. He died in our place, taking the wrath of God on himself, so that everyone who believes that Jesus died for their sin and rose from the dead is given the promise of eternity and this new creation, when God restores creation to what it should be, and as a gift of God, it's received only by faith. And so the story of our faith is one where God doesn't just mourn over creation and its fallenness, but is actively saving it. And that's the hope of our faith. That like the hope of our faith is not just some sort of otherworldly place that we go when we die, heaven. Although I believe that's real, the hope of our faith is why John comes in Revelation. I saw a new heaven, a new earth. The hope of the faith is that God restores the earth. So heaven in our faith is where we wait until he does that, but he will actually restore creation, and we long for that day. That's why Christ, when He conquered death, he didn't stay a spirit. He rose in a body, because he's the first fruits of the new creation. He's the beginning of so you know that's going to happen. Here's Christ in the body that is not subject to death anymore.

23:35  
Man, well, before we wrap up, are there any we went a bunch of different places with this episode. Are there any questions you guys can think of that maybe someone is asking that is looking for answers in this episode that we might not have gone there yet?

23:53  
Yeah, I could think of a couple. Josh, I would love to know your take first one would be, what about babies who have been aborted, or infants or miscarried babies, of those whose parents aren't Christians, like maybe they they were lost infants in non Christian households, you know, like for those who don't call on the Lord, what would you say about them?

24:23  
Oh, man, okay. Man, all right. So a couple places, I think there's a difference in grieving. For the families who do know the Lord like we don't grieve like everyone else, there is this comfort. There is a certainty we have that the world does not have. And so for the Christian family who has lost a child, the Scriptures tell you Don't grieve like the rest of the world, there is a hope that you have, and it's a certain hope. And so I think that can apply here in this situation, that you can try. Us. The Lord is really good. He's really, kind of really cares about you and your children, has good intentions for them. And so, yeah, I would say, Look, you have a forward looking hope for the if you have a family member who's not a believer and has lost a child. We are, we are not departing at all, I think, from the character and the goodness of God still, and I think that's the comfort we have, is that God is good to the world, even when the world was not good to him. God is a saving God when the world didn't want him to save them, and were when we were plummeting into death, while we were still yet sinners, while we were still yet enemies, Christ died. And so though they don't know it out of the kindness of his heart, we have a God who will, who is pulling people out of darkness, in into his light. So I think we have that for for those of you who know people who may not be Christian but have lost a child, there's still God's goodness there. As far as man aborted babies, I think, I think again, we're right back to where we are. And I think that's the good news, right? We're not ever moving apart from God's kindness and goodness and mercy. Here for the Christian who has committed that sin and aborted a child and is looking back thinking, man, what was I thinking? Why did I do that? God's not gonna respond to your child based on your sin.

26:41  
Yeah, wow, yeah. Where else do we see God making a decision for somebody based on, right? You know, yeah,

26:53  
yeah, someone else to sit No, he's, he's, he's going to approach that child same love and patience and kindness that he will, he will approach you with, right? Yeah, if you have committed that and you're looking back you, you know in Christ, Jesus, I'm totally and completely forgiven, well, he's not going to punish your child while you're totally, completely forgiven. So we know for sure that Christ will love that child. I have no doubt about that. That's what I would have to say. That's really good, dude, yeah.

27:24  
Well, thanks guys. Thank you for joining us for this episode, and I hope you brought some comfort and some answers to you, and if you have ideas for future episodes, or if there's a direction we didn't go, we'd love to hear from you. This is, I would say, put it in the comment box, but this is a pretty heavy topic, so send us an email podcast at we are the bridge.org Thanks for watching. You.