Not So Innocent After All

Every so often we hear or read a hardcore (or unthinking) Arminian or a Nullifidian make remarks about "innocent babies." Well, it seems that babies aren't so innocent after all, and its not just those of who believe in original sin saying it.

Original sin makes the news!

Notice the opening paragraph:

Whether lying about raiding the biscuit tin or denying they broke a toy, all children try to mislead their parents at some time. Yet it now appears that babies learn to deceive from a far younger age than anyone previously suspected.

Then a bit later:

Until now, psychologists had thought the developing brains were not capable of the difficult art of lying until four years old.

How sad it is to read this from the nation that produced the Westminster Standards.

Here's a sample from the WSC:

I. Our first parents, being seduced by the subtilty and temptations of Satan, sinned, in eating the forbidden fruit. This their sin, God was pleased, according to His wise and holy counsel, to permit, having purposed to order it to His own glory.

II. By this sin they fell from their original righteousness and communion, with God, and so became dead in sin, and wholly defiled in all the parts and faculties of soul and body.

III. They being the root of all mankind, the guilt of this sin was imputed; and the same death in sin, and corrupted nature, conveyed to all their posterity descending from them by ordinary generation.

IV. From this original corruption, whereby we are utterly indisposed, disabled, and made opposite to all good, and wholly inclined to all evil, do proceed all actual transgressions.

V. This corruption of nature, during this life, does remain in those that are regenerated; and although it be, through Christ, pardoned, and mortified; yet both itself, and all the motions thereof, are truly and properly sin.

VI. Every sin, both original and actual, being a transgression of the righteous law of God, and contrary thereunto, does in its own nature, bring guilt upon the sinner, whereby he is bound over to the wrath of God, and curse of the law, and so made subject to death,[17] with all miseries spiritual, temporal, and eternal.

I hate to break it to Richard Gray, the writer of the article, but the WSC recognized this about babies several hundred years ago.

In fact, the Bible itself addresses this directly:

Psalm 58:3: The wicked are estranged from the womb;
These who speak lies go astray from birth.

HT: Jonathan Moorhead