Is there a verse for age of accountability? Is this a made-up statement or
phrase? Perhaps it might be necessary
to explain what's behind that. What's behind that is pan-evangelical
theological reasoning, which Because it's pan-evangelical
means almost everyone's heard it. Almost everyone knows what
we're talking about. There is a certain biblical notion
behind the fact that there's greater and lesser responsibility
with age. You see this in the curse against
the generation in the wilderness. They say, but your little ones,
they will enter the kingdom. They will enter the land of Canaan.
And by the way, it's a very interesting way it's said there in the opening
of Deuteronomy, it says, your little ones who you say know not the
difference between good and evil. I mean, as parents we recognize
some different kinds of accountability. Psychiatrists would come in and
say, look, in early adolescence one of the achievements is the
ability of complex analytical reasoning. which means a 4-year-old
thinks, but a 14-year-old thinks about thinking. So, and that
is a big difference for those of you who are over 14. You think
about thinking. There are very few 4-year-old
existentialists because it just, it just doesn't work. A popsicle
solves everything. But the Bible is very clear that
there is no innocence ever. I mean, the same psalmist whom
I read this morning from Psalm 139 says, in sin did my mother
conceive me. So there's no age of accountability,
like there is no accountability before this age. In the same
way that, again, you parent, you can't believe that you ever
have anything other than a sinner. This is the doctrine of total
depravity. If you don't believe that, you will misparent from
the womb. But you don't deal with a 4-year-old
like you deal with a 14-year-old, and there are issues even of
maturity in Christ. The age of accountability is
a fundamentally kind of Neo-Arminian, revivalistic, pan-evangelical
notion that wants to say to people, there is a moment… I thought
I was raised, so I thought I just figured out I was 13, because
it had something to do with the bar mitzvah and Jesus and the
temple, and the closer I got to 13, the more worried I became. It's a ridiculous notion, but
it's based upon our experience of greater and lesser responsibility.
But it is just simply, it drives us back to Scripture where there
is no innocence. The age of accountability was
the moment that Adam and Eve took of the forbidden fruit,
and once Adam's sin is imputed to us, then we're accountable. from the very beginning. There
has to be some other answer. It also was a Protestant revivalistic
answer. Pragmatically, and I can say
this as a Baptist, capital B to infant baptism and the confirmation
that came as a natural process in many traditional Lutheran
and Reformed denominations, and it was emphatically a response
to Roman Catholic notions of baptism and the sacrament of
baptism. So we kind of have the sacrament
of the age of accountability. It isn't in the Bible. The age of accountability, you
might say, is conception. But we do recognize that we speak
to a fourteen-year-old differently than a four-year-old, but in
both cases we are talking to a sinner who desperately needs
salvation found only through faith and trust in the Lord Jesus
Christ.