By NiteOwlDave
niteowldave@gmail.com
There are three schools of thought about the age of accountability regarding one’s salvation.
The age is not clearly identified in Scripture. The Bible says we are born with a sinful nature, that we all choose to sin, and that our sin is forgiven if we repent and believe in our heart that the Lord Jesus Christ paid our sin debt in full with his blood when He died and rose again.
Perhaps the reason the Bible does not state an age is because children mature at different paces. That would be true from culture to culture, and from age to age in history.
1. Some say the age when a child is on the hook for his own sin is when he begins to know right from wrong and hears about Jesus. Author-Bible teacher John MacArthur's says, “When a young child says, ‘I want to invite Christ into my life,’ then you need to encourage him to do that. At what point that becomes saving faith -- only God knows for certain.”
2. The Jews teach the age of accountability is 12 as that was when Jesus was taken by His parents to Jerusalem for the Passover and the Feast, and He went absent to the temple and asked profound questions of his elders. This age seems to be when those kinds of questions begin to be personal in the heart of a child.
Luke 2:46 says, “They (Mary and Joseph) returned to Jerusalem, searching for him. After three days they found him in the temple, sitting among the teachers, listening to them and asking them questions.”
3. Some say the age is 20. In the book of Numbers, 20 years old was the age when males were considered mature enough to serve in the army and be counted independently in the census.
Numbers 14:29; 32:11 says, “In the wilderness your bodies will fall…every one of you 20 years old or more…surely none of the men that came up out of Egypt, from twenty years old and upward, shall see the land which I swore to Abraham. Isaac and..Jacob because they have not wholly followed me.”
Those aged 20 or above did not enter Canaan after fleeing Egypt. They all died in the wilderness for their sin of unbelief. Those below the age of 20 were, apparently, considered too immature to be held accountable for not believing the account of Joshua and Caleb concerning the Promised Land.
