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the Age of Accountability |
I was reading through the Pentateuch (the 1st five books of the bible) the other day, and discovered something really interesting in regards to this issue of the age of accountability. With all the discussions and hand-wringing that I’ve been a part of through my life in the church, I’m surprised that no-one has ever brought this up. So here it is:
From the account in Numbers 14 when the people of Israel refused to go in and take the land, we read this statement:
26 The LORD said to Moses
and Aaron: 27 "How long will this wicked community
grumble against me? I have heard the complaints of these grumbling Israelites. 28 So tell them, 'As surely as I live, declares the LORD, I
will do to you the very things I heard you say: 29 In
this desert your bodies will fall—every one of you twenty years old or more
who was counted in the census and who has grumbled against me.
From Moses’ reiteration of that event in Deuteronomy 1:
37 Because of
you the LORD became angry with me also and said, "You shall not enter it,
either. 38 But your assistant, Joshua son of Nun, will
enter it. Encourage him, because he will lead Israel to inherit it. 39 And the little ones that you said would be taken
captive, your children who do not yet know good from bad—they will enter the
land. I will give it to them and they will take possession of it.
So: apparently in God’s eyes, at least in this case, the children who “did not yet know good from bad” were those younger than 20 years of age: i.e., teenagers.
This squares with modern research which suggests that brain development which allows for the connection of behavior with consequences does not happen until at or around that time of a person’s life. This is the corpus callosum (pre-frontal cortex), a bundle of nerves that connects the right and left halves of the brain and is linked to intelligence, consciousness, and self-awareness. It matures the most between the ages of 12 and 20.
Seems about right to me, except that in my case I would say I wasn’t in a space where I could really “get it” until my mid-20’s sometime, but hey—some of us are slower than others. I imagine that it doesn’t square with the nature of who God is or how his kingdom functions to really believe that after 12:01 (eastern standard? Central time?) on our birthday, we’ll all of a sudden go to hell of we don’t accept Christ. For the Israelites in their situation, they needed something like that, but for me this just appears to be a reasonable “its around there somewhere” kind of time frame. In any event, we can be sure to be able to place our trust in a merciful and all-knowing God in this, as in all things.