COLLEEN TINKER
Recently I encountered a question from a former Adventist who was upset about the idea that babies are born spiritually dead. The questioner asked how we could make such a claim; weren’t children innocent until they reached the “age of accountability”?
I know that Adventism often teaches that people are not considered truly guilty before God until they reach the age of 12 or 13, an age they call the “age of accountability”. They do not offer scriptural support for this idea except to refer to Jesus teaching the scribes in the temple when he was 12 years old.
This idea isn’t unique to Adventists. It is hard to comes to terms with what Scripture says about our natural condition as humans if one hasn’t been taught what the Bible says from an early age. The hidden blessing in knowing the biblical truth, though, is that God is more gracious and more personally involved with us than we think He is if we believe we are responsible to get ourselves “saved”.
We find the truth, though, in Ephesians 2:3 where Paul says we are “BY NATURE children of wrath”. If our natures are dead in sin (Ephesians 2:1–3) from our birth, we cannot rise above our natures on our own. In other words, we don’t learn to make conscious choices to do evil; we make them naturally. This text means that BY NATURE we are children of wrath—our normal, natural essence is condemned. Further, in John 3:18 Jesus Himself says to Nicodemus, “He who believes in Him is not judged; he who does not believe HAS BEEN JUDGED ALREADY, because he has not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God.”
In other words, people are condemned to eternal judgment and death until and unless they believe. We are all, as David said, conceived in sin, and we are condemned, “by nature children of wrath”, until we believe. We are born condemned.
Further, Romans 3:9–18 quotes and compiles many Old Testament texts declaring that “there is none righteous, not even one; there is none who understands, there is none who seeks for God; all have turned aside, together they have become useless, there is none who does good, there is not even one…there its no fear of God before their eyes.”
No person can even seek for God, much less understand Him, in his natural state. We cannot rise above our natures. God has to call us and reveal Himself to us; without His intervention, we would all be condemned.
Colossians 1:13 even states that when we have believed—something that occurs because God Himself calls us and teaches us and reveals our sin to us—He transfers us from “the domain of darkness” into the “kingdom of His beloved Son.” In other words, each one of us is born into the domain of darkness. We have to be transferred out of our natural habitat by God Himself.
Age Of Accountability
The Bible never speaks of an age of accountability. That idea is a long tradition, but it is not in Scripture. We are born dead in sin, by nature (as we are naturally) condemned, children of wrath. Yes, Jesus Himself said that anyone who has NOT believed is condemned already.
But here’s the hope for the babies who die in infancy. Salvation is of the Lord. He knows how to make even the unborn His own. John the Baptist was filled with the Holy Spirit in His mother’s womb (Luke 1:15). David said that his dead baby could not return to him, but he would go where the baby was (2 Samuel 12:23). God knows how to save babies; He doesn’t tell us exactly HOW that works, but He has given us enough so we know we can TRUST Him with these things.
Since salvation is of the Lord, not of ourselves, He is responsible for revealing Himself to all people. In fact, Romans 1:18-21 says that God reveals His eternal, divine identity through what has been made so that all men are without excuse. HE reveals Himself. He draws people to Himself. It doesn’t depend upon having adequate maturity or IQ. Believing in Jesus is the work of God, and we can trust Him to save every single person He has given to the Son, as Jesus stated in John 6:37.
In short, yes: we are all condemned to eternal death when we are born. But God loved us, the condemned creatures who are born in the image of Adam, and He sent His own Son wrapped in mortal flesh—yet sinless. He was never spiritually dead. He was conceived by the Holy Spirit and never had sin/death as part of His nature.
God “smuggled” life into the domain of darkness in the person of His Son, and Jesus was thus able to die a sinless human death that paid for our sin. He was able to take the curse of the law and to break its curse by rising from death because His sacrifice was SINLESS and sufficient. He was the only person ever born who did not need to be born again! He was the Perfect Israel, the Perfect Human, and He has become the head of the new race of people who BELIEVE, who are born again into new life and rescued from our natural state of death and condemnation.
We are not born able to choose. We are born UNABLE to please, know, or seek God. BUT GOD—our Lord comes after us and rescues us from our natural state of death! He reveals Himself to us and helps us see our natural condition and His provision for us. He gives us the faith to believe. It’s all of HIM! †
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Wonderfully written and faithful to the Word. It is heart-wrenching to lose a very young child, but if the Lord grants them years, we parents and grandparents, aunts and uncles, should commit to teaching them to TRUST the LORD. Their mortal life is one thing, but their eternal destiny is quite another. Children can comprehend the gospel truth at a very young age.
Interestingly, the terms “children of wrath” (Eph 2:3) or “children of the devil” (1 Jh 3:10) are primarily describing adults, but adults whose whole life is under review from infancy to adulthood. They are not described as “adults of wrath.” The same can be said of the term “children of Israel” which encompasses every Israelite whether old or young. And we did not enlist in the devil’s kingdom, as if it were a conscious choice made as an adult after sound deliberation. Sadly, we were by nature born into a state of enmity with God (Rom 8:7).