Pastors hear this question often. In just the last several weeks it has been asked twice of me and, whether true or not, it is usually safe to assume there is an underlying reason for it being asked. In other words, the question usually doesn’t come from left field but some of kind of personal experience. The pain of miscarriages, abortions, and child-death wreaks havoc on the memories of many.

I remember being a teenager when one of our pastor’s daughters died in infancy. It was the first funeral I had ever attended, yet one thing a funeral like that makes you think is, “Caskets should never have to be made that small.”

A few years later, while in college, I became a Calvinist and started reading material that was mostly Calvinistic. One famous Calvinistic document is the 2nd London Baptist Confession of the Faith (along with the Westminster Confession and Savoy Declaration). Overall, these are wonderful documents that I think accurately portray the Christian faith according to the Bible. They say this about those who die in infancy (specifically using the baptist version here):

Elect infants dying in infancy are regenerated and saved by Christ through the Spirit; who worketh when, and where, and how he pleases; so also are all elect persons, who are incapable of being outwardly called by the ministry of the Word.

2nd London Baptist Confession of the Faith, 10.3

I don’t’ think this is helpful at all. What it means has been discussed in a couple of expositions of the Confession. Some believe it was written to be intentionally vague; others believe it is as hardline as it sounds. I think it would have been far better for the Confession to stay quiet on this issue. While the Confession should have remained so, I do not believe the Bible has remained silent here.

While at college, the hardline perspective of the Confession is the perspective I believed until I came into contact with a two-part message by John MacArthur shortly later. I remember this series stopping me in my tracks as he carefully wove together a biblical argument that displayed the grace of God toward children who die in the womb or very young, and it has been the position I’ve held to since. In fact, I had been meaning for a long time to re-listen to these messages, and I just finished doing so today. I would heartily recommend them to you; they can be found here: https://www.gty.org/library/topical-series-library/269/what-happens-to-babies-who-die