Transcript

ANNOUNCER: Is there an age of accountability? If so, I wonder what it is. Does the Bible give any clues about this? Hello, friend. Thank you for joining us on Grace and Focus. We come to you weekdays and we are a ministry of the Grace Evangelical Society. Our website is faithalone.org. We invite you to go there, find out more about us, including our free online seminary where you can earn an MDiv degree. Free if you maintain a 3.0 average. Apply and get ready to study with us next semester. Find all the details at faithalone.org.

 Now with today’s question and answer discussion, here are Bob Wilkin and Sam Marr. 

SAM: Okay, Bob, we have a question from EA. This is kind of a general question on the concept of the age of accountability. He said he used to believe in the age of accountability, but is no longer strongly convinced. And so he’s just looking for some Scripture to back it up, and sure your view on why you hold to it. 

BOB: And I think he says he’s a father of four, is that right? 

SAM: Yep, a father of four, so it’s definitely relevant. And then he’s got an example we’ll get to later of a person that he dealt with this issue.

BOB: When he was working in an evangelistic ministry. Okay. So EA, I would say there absolutely is an age of accountability. And in terms of Scripture, it’s difficult to come up with what is the age of accountability. But the idea that there is an age of accountability, I don’t think is that hard to come up with. And then I’ll tell you what I think the age of accountability is in the Scripture I used. 

In terms of how we know there’s an age of accountability, there’s a principle we find from Genesis to Revelation. And that is God never holds people accountable for what they’re unable to do. Now, obviously Calvinists would not agree with that, right? But the Scriptures are clear that we’re accountable if we’re able. For example, in John 5:39-40, “You search the Scriptures for in them, you think you have eternal life. But these are they which testify of Me, but you’re not willing to come to Me that you may have life.”

Well, let’s say someone dies at the age of one day, willingness has nothing to do with it. They have no opportunity to believe. They can’t understand the saving message. They can’t believe it. Now, we can argue differently as to what age does a person become able to believe the saving message. The people I talk with with Child Evangelism Fellowship say it’s somewhere between the ages of 5 and 10 and it varies from child to child. The reason they say it’s that high is because even though children under age 5 can parrot back what you tell them and they can say, oh yes, I believe that. They don’t distinguish fantasy from reality until they’re about five or in some children’s cases seven, eight, nine, ten. 

But in any case, they’re clearly everybody recognizes there’s clearly ages under which someone cannot believe, they’re unable to believe. I think the answer relates to Kadesh-Barnea. Sam, what happened at Kadesh-Barnea? 

SAM: Right. They’re wandering in the desert and they are coming to the Promised Land and God commands them to send spies in to to scope out the land in advance. 

BOB: Yeah, and they send in 12, one from each tribe. And what’s the report? Do they all come back and say, God said this land is ours? God promised it. Let’s go. 

SAAM: Most of them were afraid of the giant men that they saw there. 

BOB: Yeah, they called them giants were grasshoppers and they’re saying, how many said let’s go up? 

SAM: I think it’s just two, right, Joshua and one other. 

BOB: Joshua and Caleb. Yeah, so what did they want to do? Let’s go back to Egypt, you know, God’s brought us here to kill us. He’s going to kill our children. He’s going to kill our wives. We need to pick new leaders and go back to Egypt. Go back to slavery. Well, God put a kibosh on that. And God said, everyone over the age of 20, 20 and over was going to die in the wilderness. Only the children up to age 19 years and 364 days, or back in their calendars, 359 days. Only those under 20 were going to be spared. And so over the next 38 years, all those over age 20 died, except for Joshua and Caleb, even Moses died. And so the age of accountability there was 20. That suggests to me that that’s the age of accountability for the promise of eternal life. And Jewish rabbis have long held that view, that that’s the age of accountability. 

But I think the point to keep in mind is this, an 18 year old that was standing there, an 18 year old male, might be strong enough to have opinions and have a persuasion. But he wasn’t accountable if he was one of the people saying, yeah, let’s go back. Let’s go back to Egypt. Let’s pick new leaders. Even if so, he was not held accountable because he was under the age of accountability. 

And so my answer would be that the age of accountability is much higher than the age at which a child can first believe. Let’s say that Child Evangelism Fellowship is right and a child can believe somewhere between 5 and 10. What if that child dies at age 18, never having come to faith? Well, in my view, that child is not going to be eternally condemned. 

Now, what happens to them is this whole separate question. One option, which is the one most people have is they say, if you die below the age of accountability, you’re just given eternal life. My view is I think it’s much more likely what God will do is bring them back in the Millennium. They will live out their natural life in the Millennium when Jesus is present. And if they come to faith, they’ll be born again. If they don’t, they’ll be eternally condemned. 

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BOB: But however God does it, he’s not going to condemn people who can’t believe and he’s not even going to condemn people, in my view, who could believe but haven’t reached the age of accountability. There’s a book, Heaven For Those Who Can’t Believe by Dr. Robert Lightner and he argues the moment at which a child was capable of believing that’s when he’s accountable. That would be the way most people but I think you said that EA had a second related question. 

SAM: Yeah, the other part to his question is, he said during an evangelistic ministry, a student asked about his handicapped brother who, and I’m assuming it’s a mental handicap, asking if he would be accountable for believing for everlasting life or if he would—and the assumption here is also that he’s older. 

BOB: And what did EA say at the time? 

SAM: At the time he gave him some resources. He shared an article called, do infant/children go to heaven when they die. And then it doesn’t say he said he gave him some comfort at the time. But now, you know, looking back, he’s worried he was giving false hope to people by sharing resources like that. 

BOB: Yeah, so I think it’s possible that EA has come under the influence of Calvinism because Calvinism is very deterministic, very fatalistic and faith isn’t something that has anything to do with us. There’s nothing about being willing. God just either gives the gift of faith or he doesn’t. And in Calvinism, regeneration occurs before faith, even if it’s just a nanosecond before, first you’re born again, then you believe. So it could be he’s been influenced by Calvinism. 

But what I would say is this, there’s a lot of people in the history of the church who have had mental abilities below the IQ necessary to believe in Jesus for everlasting life. Now, I don’t happen to know what that is. I think possibly someone with an IQ of 30 might be able to grasp the idea of life after death and grasp the idea of being forever with God and that by faith in Jesus they have it. So maybe someone with an IQ of 30 could do that. 

Sharon’s first cousin taught people with IQs in the range of about 30 to 40 for years, and they were able to pick up some things, but they were also very wooden in their thinking. Like if one of the other people pulled their chair away, they’d come back and just go right on the ground even though they could see there was no chair there because they didn’t think in terms of the fact that, wow, the chair’s not there anymore.

And so I would say that they fall in the same category as children under the age of accountability. They will either be given eternal life when they die or they will come back in the Millennium with all their faculties and all their abilities and they will either come to faith or they won’t. 

But either way, God doesn’t condemn people for what they’re unable to do. You see, one of the characteristics of God, right, is that He’s good. Well, it would, it wouldn’t be good to condemn people who are unable to believe. And another characteristic is He’s just, and it would not be just of God to condemn people who are unable to believe.

SAM: Right. And that’s, that’s a whole other discussion because it can be hard for humans to determine what’s just an unjust because God is perfectly just and we sometimes confuse justice with fairness. 

BOB: That’s a good point. So how do we determine what is just? In other words, you’re right, I have a friend who says it would be unjust if a person with full mental capacity who lived well beyond the age of accountability, let’s say they lived to be age 80, but they never heard the name of Jesus in his view would be unjust of God to condemn that person because they never heard the name of Jesus. And I’m telling him he’s wrong. But on what basis do we determine what’s just and what’s unjust? 

SAM: Scripture, it’s the only thing we have. 

BOB: Right. So we can’t go, you know what, it doesn’t seem fair to me that God would do that. Well, it doesn’t matter what we think is fair, it matters what God thinks is fair. And so if God says it’s appointed for man once to die and then comes judgment, well, that’s true. We don’t get any opportunities postmortem with the possible exception, in my mind of people who die below the age of accountability or people who are unable to believe because of mental incapacity. And even there, I’m taking a big speculation. Maybe they just all get eternal life at the moment they die. 

SAM: Yeah, I’m 100% confident that we’re not going to fully understand until we have the mind of Christ completely. So that’s something to look forward to. And that’s what comforts me is all these questions, we don’t have an exact verse that says this is exactly what’s going to happen. So there’s room for people to speculate that I trust that, you know, once we are on the new earth with Christ, it’ll make sense to us and we’ll be at peace with the decisions that He made and the actions that He took. 

BOB: Yeah, it’s a good point. I might mention in closing, in Matthew 18, Jesus refers to someone who misleads these little ones who believe in Me. And the little ones He’s talking about are probably somewhere in the range of eight to ten. It is clear in Scripture that children can believe in Christ, but we don’t have a verse that talks about what about children who die before they become adults. So we base it on other principles like God only holds us accountable for what we’re capable of doing and also Kadesh-Barnea.

Well, thanks so much, EA, and let’s remember to keep grace in focus.

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On our next episode: has the Church replaced Israel in God’s plan? Join us again and in the meantime, let’s keep grace in focus.