who would go back to Ecclesiastes chapter six.
So this verse here talks about not being buried
as a dishonor.
And he says, you know, if this guy doesn't see any good
and he also has no burial, at the end of verse three,
it says, I say that an untimely birth is better than he.
Better than the guy who begat 100 children.
You say, how can somebody begat 100 children?
Well, first of all, there's this thing called polygamy
that Solomon knew a little something about.
But not only that, okay, this could probably also
just be referring to children, grandchildren,
great-grandchildren, you know, God willing,
I hope to live to be a very old man
and someday have 100 descendants myself.
I'm doing my part, you know, we'll see if my kids
do their part and my grandkids and so forth.
But I wanna have the 100 children and the burial.
I'm gonna do the best of both worlds.
But it says, an untimely birth is better than he.
Look at verse number four.
It says, "For he cometh in with vanity,"
the untimely birth that is, "and departeth in darkness,
"and his name shall be covered with darkness.
"Moreover, he hath not seen the sun nor known anything.
"This hath more rest than the other."
Now, what is an untimely birth?
Well, we would think of this as a miscarriage.
That's probably the word that we would use.
A child who dies in his mother's womb is a miscarriage.
Now, the reason that this would be called an untimely birth
is because of the fact that when a woman is pregnant
and her child dies, a lot of times that will trigger her
to go into labor immediately.
So even if she's not full term, she's not to nine months,
this process is triggered, and so the untimely birth
is referring to a miscarriage.
But not only that, if you think about it,
we have today extremely premature babies that can survive,
but part of that is due to modern technology.
I remember many years ago reading a news story
about a record being said, I think it was like
the University of Chicago Medical Center,
and what was the age, it was like 23 weeks gestation
or something, what was it?
21 or something, it was some incredibly premature child,
using a lot of technology and everything.
And look, obviously back in the ancient world
in Bible times, you're not gonna be able
to have very premature babies.
Obviously you'd have some that are a bit premature
that could survive, but pretty much,
if they're very premature in those days,
they're just gonna die anyway.
And so it's an untimely birth that's associated with death.
And so he's saying, man, you'd rather be the untimely birth.
What's the point of even living if you end your life
as someone who nobody cares about, is what he's saying.
You might as well just been a miscarriage.
And then he basically just says they haven't seen the sun
or known anything, this hath more rest than the other.
Now, we strongly believe from the word of God
that all babies go to heaven.
That's what the Bible teaches.
So the untimely birth goes straight to heaven.
It's not just a lump of cells or,
and you know what's funny about that
is that I'm a lump of cells too.
What does that even mean?
Oh, it's just a lump of cells.
Well, so are you, buddy.
You big ugly lump of cells, you.
Who do you think you are?
You know, you wanna murder this little tiny lump of cells.
You're a big fat lump of cells.
But guess what?
We're alive.
We're human.
We're God's creation.
We're the children of God.
We're not just a lump of cell,
a lump of tissue or whatever.
And so the baby in its mother's womb is alive.
There's plenty of scripture to prove that.
You know, you have incidents like John the Baptist
leaping in his mother's womb
when he's in the presence of Jesus Christ.
And so, you know, we have, of course,
God knowing us and forming and fashioning us
in our mother's womb.
And we have John the Baptist being filled
with the Holy Ghost from his mother's womb.
Was this like the Holy Ghost in that lump of cells?
No, it's a person.
Also, we have the Old Testament law,
which states that if a woman is pregnant
and someone injures her maliciously
and causes the baby to die, that it's life for life.
It's basically the death penalty
for murdering a child in its mother's womb.
It's a death penalty.
So that's life, and even today,
in our modern jurisprudence, guess what?
If you murder a pregnant woman, that's a double homicide.
But oh, it's not alive, it's not a person, it's garbage.
And you know what?
Any kind of a science definition of life
would say that that baby is alive.
I mean, if they found it on Mars,
they'd have a field day with that, right?
I mean, if they found, you know, forget a lump of cells,
they would love to just find one cell on Mars
and get all excited and pop the cork on the champagne
and say, yes, we proved that life can originate by itself
without God.
So amazing.
Isn't that what they would do?
They'd get all excited and blaspheme
and curse the name of God
because they found some single cell on Mars.
Well, guess what?
Science is real.
Lib tard.
And you know what?
Abortion is murder.
It's so funny how the liberals love to say,
so we believe in science, science is real.
No, you don't believe in science
'cause if you believe in science,
you wouldn't be murdering babies.
You'd say they're alive.
And you'd also believe in two genders, male and female,
if you actually believe in science.
But there's a lot of scripture on this.
Like for example, in Job, if you would flip back to Job,
you can keep your finger there and Ecclesiastes will be back,
but there's a very similar passage in Job chapter three
to what we see in Ecclesiastes chapter six.
You know, speaking of depressing chapters
in the Bible, right?
Let's go back to Job chapter three,
where Job is cursing the day wherein he was born.
And every time I read this verse,
I think about the fact that, you know how we have the bulletins on Sunday and they have
like a picture and they have a Bible verse on the front?
We actually, we don't pick those pictures and verses, although we do veto some of them,
but we get those from a company that sends us those.
We make the rest of the bulletin, but it's like a ready-made picture with a Bible verse.
And I remember one time we're making the bulletin and we look at the front of the bulletin and
the verse that's on the front of the bulletin said, "Why died I not from the womb?"
And I was just thinking like, that's an odd choice, you know, for a Sunday morning bulletin.
But that's what I always think of when I read this verse.
Job, you know, you start running out of verses down at the bulletin company and, you know,
you start putting a verse about Judas hanging himself or something, you know.
What's it going to say next week, you know, Adam, Seth, Enos or something?
Alright, Job 311, "Why did I not die from the womb?
Why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?
Why did the knees prevent me, or why the breasts that I should suck?
For now should I have lain still and been quiet, I should have slept, then had I been
at rest."
And that's the exact word that was used in Ecclesiastes' rest.
But let's keep going.
With kings and counselors of the earth, which built desolate places for themselves, or with
princes that had gold, who filled their houses with silver, or as in hidden untimely birth
I had not been.
As infants which never saw light, again the same wording as in Ecclesiastes about not
seeing the sun.
"There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary be at rest, there the prisoners
rest together, they hear not the voice of the oppressor."
Does this sound like the baby is just ceasing to exist?
No.
It's going to this place where the small and greater there, verse 19, and the servant is
free from his master.
He says, "Wherefore is light given unto him that is in misery, and life unto the bitter
and soul, which long for death, but it cometh not, and dig for it more than for hid treasures,
which rejoice exceedingly and are glad when they can find the grave?
Why is light given to a man whose way is hid, and whom God hath hedged in?"
So there's the same type of idea here in Job that's saying that you're better off to just
die before you're even born, like dying in the womb, or dying as an infant, than to live
a horrible life.
Which makes sense.
It reminds me of what Jesus said about Judas Iscariot.
It would be better for him if he'd never been born.
And that's true, because if he'd never been born, where would he be right now?
He'd be in heaven.
Right now he's burning in hell.
But if he'd never been born, he'd be in heaven right now.
Now you say, "Well, Pastor Anderson, why are you upset about abortion, then, if all these
babies are going to heaven?"
Here's the thing about that.
First of all, there are people out there who have this really weird, sick doctrine that
teaches that God just damns babies to hell, that he just sends unborn babies and newborn
babies to hell.
I'm not saying that all Calvinists believe that, but there are a lot of Calvinists who
believe that.
And then you'll see certain Calvinists really excited about protesting abortion clinics all
the time.
And part of the reason why ... I mean, I'm glad that they're fighting abortion, but I
wish it weren't because they have this sick doctrine, this bizarre doctrine, because it's
like they don't understand the Bible, or they don't understand the nature of God, they don't
understand the nature of salvation that God is just damning people.
I had a Calvinist one time tell me, and again, I'm not saying that all Calvinists believe
this, but there are a lot of Calvinists who will come right out and say that they believe
this.
But I had one Calvinist say, "Well, if they're the children of Christians, they go to heaven.
If they're the children of the unsaved, they go to...what in the world?"
But a lot...I've heard some of them just say they all go to hell.
That's nonsense.
Okay, the Bible clearly...there's a lot of evidence.
And you think about the case with King David, where King David's baby died, and that baby
was a product of an adulterous union.
And yet he said that he can't bring it back, but he said, "The child cannot come back to
me, but I will go to the child."
And he rejoiced and was at peace about it once the child passed away, because he knew
that the child was in heaven.
So there's a lot of biblical evidence.
I think one of the strongest pieces of evidence, another verse that unfortunately people don't
really think about, Romans chapter 7 verse 9 says, "For I was alive without the law once,
but when the commandment came, sin revived, and I died."
And so a baby is in innocence, just like Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
They didn't know that they were naked, little toddlers run around naked and don't even
give it a second thought, because they're innocent.
And because they're innocent, they go to heaven.
Just like Adam and Eve before they sinned, children are innocent, they go straight to
heaven.
So you say, "Well then why are you so mad about abortion?"
First of all, number one, you don't see me spending my life fighting abortion.
I don't spend my life just on a crusade to fight abortion, because I'd rather get people
out of hell.
That's what my life is mainly geared toward.
What does the New Testament tell us to gear our lives toward?
You know, preventing abortion, and I'm totally against abortion and I'll fight abortion and
stand up to abortion, but that's not the main focus.
The main focus is getting people saved, preaching the gospel to every creature, number one.
Okay, but number two, just because the babies that are aborted go straight to heaven, that
doesn't change the wickedness of the person who's committing that murder.
I mean, how could you sit there and say, "Oh, well, you know, it's okay that you murdered
a baby because it went to heaven."
You know what?
If somebody murdered me, I'm going to go to heaven, too.
Does that mean it's okay to murder me?
You know, you could murder millions of people in this world that are Christians, and you'd
just be sending people to heaven, just send them all to heaven.
That's stupid.
It doesn't make it any less wicked to commit murder where the soul's destination is.
So that doesn't make any sense.
That argument makes no sense, right?
Just because they go to heaven, it doesn't mean that we think it's okay.
It still incurs the wrath of God.
If you went and killed a bunch of Christians, they'd all go to heaven and God would be angry
at you.
And when America murders a bunch of babies, God's angry.
Whether they go to heaven or not, which we know for sure they go to heaven, there's zero
doubt that they go to heaven, but it still angers God.
In fact, they're constantly showing up in heaven and God's constantly reminded of the
garbage that's going on in our country.
So the reason that I would fight against abortion, although I'm not going to dedicate my whole
life to that, and I don't want to get unequally yoked with a bunch of unbelievers to do that.
But I would fight abortion because of the fact that it brings down the wrath of God on America.