This question has come up to me personally several times over the years. Either from women who have had the heart rending experience of having aborted a pregnancy in their youth, or the anguish of miscarriage, and sometimes even the death of an infant due to illness or injury.
Number one, the women (and often times they are still just girls and not women at all yet) are first looking for comfort during a very difficult time. Especially if the sting of death is still fresh we must not, as men and leaders of the church, try to delve into a theological treatise on death and dying and the immortal soul. The truths would still be valid and do need to be communicated, but not at the time greatest suffering.
Unfortunately for me I am about as comforting as a porcupine in these very delicate situations. My wife or someone else close to me will often provide the type of tenderness my personality does not gush in overabundance. But the answer still needs to be discussed and the truth explained.
Comfort and bedside manner aside, what actually does happen to the soul of a baby, or anyone, that does not yet (or never can have) the capacity to comprehend the notions of good and evil? Someone who has not reached the age where the necessity of needing a Savior to receive true forgiveness and eternal reward, what becomes of their eternal soul upon death?
Looking at it from a purely Calvinistic and Double Predestinarian viewpoint there is a definite answer but not necessarily definite comfort. That is until you have the proper frame of mind with regards to God, His Holiness, and His infinite knowledge and love.
The Bible, through the lens of Calvinism, clearly teaches that Mankind is born with the stain of Original Sin, i.e. we inherit the sin nature from Adam. In fact, we have inherited it so completely and so systemically that we have 1) no choice but to sin, and 2) no hope of ever not sinning. Those ideas are usually summed up by the shorthand term “total depravity”.
It is from the reality of “total depravity” that flows the reasoning behind “double predestination”. In an earlier article I introduced you to double predestination, and here in this discussion we see one of its fruits, the answer to this awful question, “where is the soul of a dead baby?”
But let’s remind everyone of some other qualities of God that get overlooked, especially in times of great sorrow and loss. God is a God of Love, the Bible rightly says that God is love. Everything God does, or allows to happen, is born first out of His perfect love. Let us also not forget His perfect knowledge. There is nothing that takes God by surprise and there is nothing contingent in His plan. There are no “if…then” statements in the perfect plan of God.
Please, let us also not forget for a moment that God does not have to allow ANYONE into His heaven. When Adam sinned and brought death and sin into this universe God could have shut up the gates of heaven for all eternity and doomed us to the devices of Satan. He could have merely erased all that He created and started afresh.
God’s love led Him to make the choice He did and begin to restore the relationship that we fractured. Instead of shutting heaven forever He opted to send His Son to restore the broken relationship we have with God the Father. God sacrificed His Son, in demands of His Holiness since nothing unholy can ever be in the presence of God. He sent Jesus to the cross to satisfy His holiness to restore what we, through Adam, destroyed.
With that backdrop, when an infant dies, that infant dies without making the choice of following Jesus, naming Him as savior, and performing the first act of obedience a believer can make, being baptized. The Bible rightly says that no one can come to the Father (i.e. heaven) except he come by the Son, Jesus. So if this was all we knew about God, Jesus, holiness, heaven and hell, we would be forced to conclude that every infant, son, daughter, boy, girl, would automatically receive the just punishment guaranteed by Adam and his sin. They would eventually be cast into the Lake of Fire for all eternity.
But…
That is not everything we know. That is not everything God has reveled to us about Him and His love for us. Way back in Exodus (and reiterated by Paul in the New Testament), we have THE most comforting and THE most hopeful passage in the Bible. The passage in Exodus is, frankly, one of the 3 most important verses in all of Scripture, and I can guess that many of you do not recall what it is. Even if I name it for you, Exodus 33:19b, you may not be able to bring it to memory without assistance.
Exodus 33:19b “I will have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I will have compassion on whom I will have compassion.”
Let that sink in for a moment. Meditate on it for a while. Just what is God saying to us in that half a verse? God is telling us, reminding us that it is ultimately HIS decision on who gets mercy, on who receives His compassion. He is telling us that He is not beholden to us nor to our sacrifices or our sincerity. He is not bound by our chanting of verses or fervent prayer.
God is pleading with us. God is saying, “TRUST ME!” “I WILL have mercy on whom I will have mercy, and I WILL have compassion on those whom I will have compassion.” He wants us to trust Him to make the correct decision on what choices He makes in our lives. God loves us and in the scripture tells us that all things that come about happen for our good and His glory.
He isn’t going to renege on His promise to make the right decisions, God is trustworthy and is worthy of our trust. So when the very difficult question is asked, “Where is the soul of the infant child who has died?” we have a true, biblical answer.
The answer is, “We don’t know, but we trust God has made the right decision for that child.” The hard part is that soul could be allowed to pass into hell and eternal damnation. The easy part is that soul could be allowed to enter into paradise and heaven. The comforting part is that it is not our decision, it is God’s decision, and He makes the right decision every time.
When we allow ourselves the opportunity to realize we are unable to fathom the entire secret counsel of God, that there are some things that God alone has purview over in our lives, we open ourselves to a brand new experience. We can experience much more intensely the presence of God in our lives because we have taken a great step torwards Him by TRUSTING Him more completely.
By insisting “God must accept everyone unable to make a profession of faith into heaven” we do violence to His Divine Counsel, and make mockery of our supposed “trust” we have in God. What kind of small God does one have when the difficult decisions of life are not left up to Him but to our vain and inflated self importance? Trust God because He is Trustworthy.
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