After my first miscarriage, I came face to face with an awful question.  Did my child go to heaven or go to hell?  I have spent much time thinking and reading on this topic, trying to grasp the Biblical scene on this as best as I can.

Of course, my immediate and emotional answer is….of course they went to heaven!!  It seriously breaks my heart like nothing else to think of my children in hell for all of eternity.

But I knew that I needed a better answer than just an emotional one.  So I went on a search.

I did end up arriving at the same conclusion…yes, they are in heaven.  Here are a few things that make me believe that this is so.

1.  Unborn babies do not know good or bad.  Deuteronomy 1:39 talks about children who “have no knowledge of good or evil.”  Babies are unaware of right and wrong, and thus do not have the ability yet to accept or reject God.
2. In a similar vein, we see throughout the Bible that people are under condemnation and receive punishment for choosing to reject God and for making deliberate choices to sin.  (2 Cor. 5:10; 1 Cor. 6:9-10; Rev. 20:11-12).  Unborn babies are not capable of that.
3. I am not saying that I believe that babies are not conceived under sin and under the curse.  The Bible is clear that all people are sinners from the womb (Psalm 51:5; Ephesians 2:3).  But, in the same way that adults are saved by grace through faith, I believe that it is by God’s grace that He saves unborn babies who are unable to consciously understand salvation.
4. R.A. Webb, in a book on infants and salvation, wrote this, “If a dead infant were sent to hell on no other account than that of original sin, there would be a good reason to the divine mind for the judgment because sin is a reality. But the child’s mind would be a perfect blank as to the reason of its suffering. Under such circumstances it would know suffering but it would have no understanding of the reason for its suffering. It could not tell itself why it was so awfully smitten and consequently the whole meaning and significance of its sufferings being to it a conscious enigma, the very essence of the penalty would be absent and justice would be disappointed, cheated of its validation.”

It is a difficult and painful question to address.  But at this point, this is where I have ended up.

A year or so ago I found this song.  It is one of my favorite songs about losing a child in the womb.  You might need a tissue…I always cry buckets when I hear this one!