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Being More Biblical Is More Comforting: Applying the Scriptures to Two of the Most Painful Situations That Believers Face
I recently received a note from a Reformed Baptist believer. He has a friend who just lost a baby at almost 8 months, and finding the "age of understanding" and "innocence of babies" explanations biblically unsatisfying, he asked how I would comfort someone in that situation. Since our congregation also has recently gone through this, and since we do have some folk who are working through how the Bible views the children of believers, I thought many might benefit from the answer. May God bless it to you.
[edit: in the absence of a "read more" link on this blog's front page, please click this post's title to read the rest of it]Upon the death of a young child, we must direct the believer for comfort and hope to the same place that we look for those things in every other circumstance: the grace of God to us in Christ.
It is remarkable that David, in the midst of a situation in which his child's death was a case of discipline upon him, still had the confidence in God to say, "he will not come back to me, but I will go to him" (2Sam 12:15-23).
His faith surprised his attendants, but it demonstrated sturdy confidence in the eternality of the soul, in the resurrection of the body, and in God's grace toward his child. There is also the passage in 1Cor 7, where Paul says that God treats believer's children different for their attachment to the believing parent. And there are so many encouragements given to us in covenant promises throughout the Bible!
It is, of course, possible to be sinfully presumptive about this.
But it is possible to be sinfully presumptive about any promise of God.
If I think to myself, "here is a guarantee of what will happen, no matter what I do," then I have no grounds for such an idea with respect to any of the promises of God. The unrepenting sinner, who yet says that he has faith, has no legitimate claim to God's promise for himself.
But the possibility of thinking and acting presumptuously does not take a single thing away from the promise: "Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ, and you shall be saved!" or "Repent and be baptized every one of you in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit." So the possibility of presumption doesn't negate or weaken the promise.
This is why, when we bring our children for baptism, we vow that our only hope that our children will be saved is that Jesus Christ will save them in the same way that He has saved us (through faith). This is the hope that the Bible holds out to believers.
But then, we proceed to vow that we will therefore be diligent with all of the means that God has appointed, through which He gives faith. Why? Because the person who genuinely hopes in God will also do whatever God says--we trust that His commands are good, not just that His promises are good.
We don't just hold to the hope that the Bible extends to us; we also obey the directions that the Bible gives us. Both must result from a hearty confidence in God's Word. And if we are missing either one, then something is broken about how we view the Bible.
So, the question about the covenant promises about our children does come down to this: are there any other promises of God that we refuse to believe in, because we are afraid that such belief might turn into a presumption? ... I hope that we're hearing crickets now!
Will our children therefore be saved without faith?
Absolutely not! For what we hope is the very opposite. And, if they cannot be saved without faith, then we urgently press upon them to believe.
How about the Christian parent, whose child rejects God?
Would we blame God for this? We cannot, when we have confessed that it is merely His sovereign grace that must save them, and when we ourselves do so much that is blameworthy in the rearing of our children, whereas God is only ever good and merciful to them.
But the parent whose child continues in rebellion against God, can yet continue to hope that God will save his child, and continue to press that child with the gospel. Why? Because such children continue in the same condition in which they have been from birth.
They haven't gone from a state of neutrality toward God to a state of rejecting Him. So the parent also may (and must!) remain where he has been since the child's birth: clinging to God's character, hoping in God's promises, and using God's means.
For the parent whose grown child continues rejecting Christ, this is far sturdier comfort and sounder counsel than what we usually hear. Most of the time, we hear instead an abuse of the text "train up a child in the way he should go, and when he is old, he will not depart from it." That text speaks of children who have been converted, and says that they will persevere. And of course converted children will! For this is a biblical doctrine.
What the "train up a child" text does not say, is what so many take it to say: that if your child failed to be trained in your home, so that he ended up wild in high school or college, that your pseudo-biblical and sin-stained attempts at rearing him are still some sort of guarantee that he will "come back" in later years.
So, just as with the presumed innocence of babies, the non-covenantal position must rest upon promises that don't exist in the Bible--precisely because it has not embraced those covenant promises that saturate Scripture from cover to cover.
Well, is God able to do this?
To save babies in the womb? Well, there is the obvious answer: "God can do anything. And this must be our starting point, because otherwise we are implying that adults are more savable because they are more intelligent or more knowledgeable.
But 1 Corinthians 2 teaches us that the "ability" to believe is not a function of the intellect, but a function of the Spirit teaching the person's heart and the Spirit also enabling the person to believe it." So the ability to know and the ability to believe are both gifts of the Holy Spirit that employ our minds, not abilities of our minds that employ the Spirit. It is no more difficult for the Spirit to do this with the first thought of the new soul, than it is with a seasoned theologian!
And we can go still further than this, because in addition to biblical theory, we also have a biblical example of this very thing. God isn't just hypothetically able to convert in the womb; He has done it before.
John the Baptist, while yet in his mother's womb, was enabled by the Spirit to recognize Jesus Christ in a manner that far exceeded our expectations of his physical (to see through two mothers' wombs?!) or mental capacity, and to respond to Jesus with believing joy.
And this believing joy is what the Bible encourages us to believe is the immediate experience of every child of a believer who dies in the womb--a believing joy that is almost immediately fulfilled, when the first human face that the child ever sees belongs to the resurrected Savior!
Appendix: What about children of unbelievers?
Well, the Bible doesn't give us nearly as much reason to hope in their case. I should couch this by saying that if I get to glory, and I discover there that every last child who died in the womb or in infancy turned out to be elect, I would not at all be surprised. Imagine how immensely populated glory would then be--and doesn't the Bible teach us that it is immensely populated?
However, there is so much less biblical warrant for this hope in the case of the child of an unbeliever. So although I would not be surprised, I do not think that the Bible anywhere gives me sufficient ground to hold out this hope to an unbelieving parent.
And if my reasoning for that hope had to include the presumed innocence of the child, then it would not just be unbiblical but even antibiblical. And of course, it is impossible for the unbelieving parent lay claim to the wonderful comforts in the first two paragraphs above, even if he could understand them.
