Kids go to heaven read 2 Samuel 12
Not what the text says. David understood that he would "go to him" when he died and went to She'ol. She'ol is not heaven. She'ol is the place of the dead, in David's time She'ol was seen as the common place of the dead. By the time of Jesus the Jewish view had come to conceive of She'ol in two parts, the abode of the righteous dead called
Gan-Eden, translated into Greek as
Paradeisos ("Paradise", from a Persian loan-word,
pairidaeza, meaning an enclosed garden); and Ge-Hinnom, transliterated into Greek as Gehenna (Ge-Hinnom literally means "Valley of Hinnom" and was a valley located outside Old Jerusalem where the Hebrew Bible says was the center of Molech worship and human sacrifice, thus the site was associated with brutal attrocities and evil, even as Gan-Eden, the Garden of Eden, was associated with the bliss Adam had with God before the Fall). These two parts of She'ol, or translated "Hades" in Greek, are illustrated in Jesus' Parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus.
The idea of "going to heaven" after death wasn't an idea which the ancient Hebrews had, and while some second temple texts, such as Enoch, locate the Garden of Eden/Paradise in the third heaven (there were seven heavens in ancient near eastern, including Hebrew, thought), the entirety of She'ol was also conceived as being "below" since the dead were interred in the earth--hence She'ol meaning "grave" or "pit".
The idea that we go to heaven to be with the Lord until the resurrection is an idea borne out of the confession that Christ overcame and defeated Hades/She'ol/Hell, and the righteous saints of old were liberated there. An idea that is touched upon by St. Paul in Ephesians 4:9 and 1 Peter 3:19. The Harrowing of Hell, or as confessed in the Apostles' Creed that Jesus "descended into hell" (Latin: "descendit ad inferos", literally "descended into the depths" or "descended into the lower regions"). And so Paul can say that to be absent from the body is to be present with the Lord, and in St. John's Apocalypse he sees, in vision, the saints of God before God's throne in heaven.
But the idea of "going to heaven" is absent from 2 Samuel 12, because that isn't how people back then thought, and it's not what David meant, or what the author of 2 Samuel meant. They mean that David will meet his deceased child in the place of the dead, since the child cannot come back to him (since he's dead).
Note that this doesn't mean children don't go to heaven, only that this passage can't be used to back up that assertion.
-CryptoLutheran
