1. Will all the children in the world be taken to heaven at the Rapture?
2. Numbers 10:9-10 (NASB) tells the Lord’s people to do certain things to remind God of their existence or need of help in battle. Why should God need to be reminded?
3. Where is it found in the Bible that when a person dies his spirit goes up to heaven, and he is given a new body? Also, who created God?
4. My fiancée and I are planning to get married soon but we argue about birth control, and the more we talk about it the more distant the prospect of a meeting of minds seems. What do you advise?

Will all the children in the world be taken to heaven at the Rapture?

The Bible doesn’t answer that question directly, so we must talk about it with humility. We first must know the difference between the Rapture and the Second Coming. The Rapture may be defined as Christ’s coming for His people, leaving unbelievers behind; the Second Coming is His coming with His people after the Rapture. His people whom He raptures (i.e. catches up to heaven) are described as believers; the Bible seems not to include or exclude children in this group. Thus, the Rapture and children is an open, disputed question.

Between the Rapture and the Second Coming certain things will happen on earth and in heaven; earth will experience the Tribulation, and heaven will see the conversations of Christ with His redeemed people, usually called the Judgment Seat of Christ. After these things, the Millennium (1,000-year reign of Christ on earth) will begin. The prophets have much to say about the Millennium. The world will be at peace and nature will revert to what God intended in Eden. Isaiah pictures a bucolic society in which today’s predators (wolves, leopards, lions) do not harm their former prey. Little children play with lions, and toddlers play around the holes where snakes hide (Isa. 11:6-9). During the Millennium, people will live a long time and reproduce; a man who dies before reaching 100 years old will be thought to have been doomed before his time (Isa. 65:20). But these considerations do not answer our question; they do not tell us whether the Rapture will take all earth’s children to heaven. The truth is, we don’t know the answer. The best we can do is to ponder consequences to each of two possible answers. If “Yes,” the removal of all earth’s children to heaven would leave the world populated only by adults, until children are born in the millennial kingdom. If “No,” the world will be filled overnight with defenseless orphans from the devastation of the Tribulation, doomed to suffer the book of Revelation’s apocalyptic curses. In my understanding of the love and mercy of God, the first answer seems more consistent with His character.

Numbers 10:9-10 (NASB) tells the Lord’s people to do certain things to remind God of their existence or need of help in battle. Why should God need to be reminded?

God didn’t need to be reminded. He wanted to be remembered by His people, and to be sought by them—for their welfare, not His. But they needed memory aids such as the blowing of trumpets to focus attention on their present peril, and to encourage united prayer. It was they who needed reminding (a) that the Lord knew what they needed and (b) that He was disposed to help them, if only they would ask for it. He knows what we need before we ask, but He wants us to pray, to remind ourselves that our source of blessing is the living God.

Where is it found in the Bible that when a person dies his spirit goes up to heaven, and he is given a new body? Also, who created God?

Taking these in order, consider 1 Corinthians 15:35-58 and 2 Corinthians 5:1-10.

The answer to the question, “Who created God”—nobody created Him. God has always existed, and all creation is proof of His existence. The link between God’s existence and creation is clearly set forth in Scripture. The mind that conceived the cosmos had to exist before the labor (God spoke, and that was all it took) to bring it into being.

Revelation 4:11 depicts a scene in heaven where He is praised in these words, “Worthy are You, our Lord and our God, to receive glory and honor and power; for You created all things.” The first verse in the Bible says, “In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth” (Gen. 1:1). Scripture makes no effort to prove the existence of God. The apostle Paul said in effect, “Don’t waste my time; in everybody there is an innate sense of the existence of God” (see Rom. 1:18-25). For unbelievers who are curious about God and inclined to believe, God reveals Himself to their seeking (Heb. 11:6).

My fiancée and I are planning to get married soon but we argue about birth control, and the more we talk about it the more distant the prospect of a meeting of minds seems. What do you advise?

I am not a marriage counselor, but I cannot refrain from telling you not to get married unless you have come to a genuine meeting of minds, after prayer and study, without coercion. The issue is too critical to expect either the groom or the bride to yield in order to be able to proceed with the wedding.

Except for the story of Onan (Gen. 38:8-10), the meaning of which is unclear, the Bible has nothing specific to say about birth control. So, we need to ponder related truths. Most commentators begin with God’s command to Adam and Eve to “be fruitful and multiply, and fill the earth” (Gen. 1:28). In other words, it is good to have children. But the command to Adam cannot apply in every marriage, all the time—some marriages don’t produce children for a variety of reasons, and those marriages are not invalid. Besides, in 1 Corinthians 7:1-9 Paul concedes that the purpose of sexual relations is not now, and never was, exclusively related to the desire to have children. There is also the “pleasure factor,” including the couple’s giving of love and comfort to one another—after the wedding, of course.

You need to think about several questions: first, what place will sex have in our lives? Will we ask God to give us children to rear in the fear of the Lord? What good reasons do we have—in the context of two lives committed to serving the Lord—for practicing birth control?

By C. Donald Cole
Moody Radio Pastor