The Bible is given to reveal God to us, and reveal His hand in all the experiences of life, so we will understand something of spiritual cause and effect. Babies and people get sick and die in this life all the time and for the most part we're completely blind to any spiritual causality in those events or any events we experience at all, both good and bad.
David's sin with Bathsheba and the murder of her husband had horrible repercussions on his family, not just the death of the first baby with Bathsheba but also the rape of his daughter Tamar by her half brother Amnon, and the murder of Amnon by the other brother Absalom, and then Absalom's challenging his father to be king and Absalom's own death. Scripture is clear that all that was the result of David's sins. We are to learn from such examples that our own sins have consequences, in our own families as well as our own lives.
It's not some arbitrary thing God does, it's about cause and effect in the spiritual realms. Scripture says God does it to give us a way to picture how it all works and of course He does do it but not in some arbitrary way, it's to be understood as how His perfect moral law operates. ("The mills of God grind esceeding fine") It's scary and depressing to think your own sins can cause misery for your children but that's what we're supposed to learn, and the suffering of our children is acute suffering for us too, in fact we'd rather take the suffering ourselves. David suffered horribly from all the miseries that came upon all his children.
Often there is not a clear cause and effect and sometimes the cause is a few generations back and beyond our ability to make the connection. Again this is not some arbitrary or whimsical thing God does, it's in the very nature of spiritual reality, it is a matter of inexorable laws built into the universe being played out. (This is how we can know if a nation commits a legal violation of God's law that the nation will also suffer judgment for it).
In any case it's childish to talk about it as GIA has been doing on this thread.
ABE: The death of the baby was part of David's judgment but it didn't stop there:
2Samuel 12:10-11 Now therefore the sword shall never depart from thine house; because thou hast despised me, and hast taken the wife of Uriah the Hittite to be thy wife. Thus saith the LORD, Behold, I will raise up evil against thee out of thine own house, and I will take thy wives before thine eyes, and give them unto thy neighbour, and he shall lie with thy wives in the sight of this sun.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
Edited by Faith, : No reason given.
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