The Least of These: Not Innocent, but Humble

Children today seem to be caught in the middle of an impossible identity crisis. It’s a maelstrom in which they are simultaneously elevated as paragons of individual invention through mechanisms like gender ideology, yet absolved of personal moral responsibility for their choices. The latter may come from popular discipline-averse parenting techniques. Either way, our culture typically assumes that innocence is at the core of every child’s natural identity. In this essay, I want to challenge that assumption with Scripture—while nevertheless holding children up as an example of something else worth imitating: humility.

Original Sin Is a Status, Not a Decision

From personal experience, I will say that regardless of all the philosophy and theories, it’s quite easy to look at a precious little baby and think, “You’re absolutely perfect—I just don’t know how you could be a sinner.” Then when the first tantrums do come, it’s easy to continue down the slippery slope of imagining that they can’t help themselves. Yet in the Bible we find that children are held to the same fundamental standard as adults when it comes to their culpability for sin. While the message of the world is often an echo of Lady Gaga’s anthem “Born This Way,” it only seems to include the things people like about themselves—and misses the very fundamental concept of original sin.

Perhaps not the most intuitive place to begin this conversation is the gospel of Matthew, chapter 18, in the middle of a conversation among the disciples about superiority and personal fulfillment. After bickering among themselves, the disciples turned to Jesus and asked him who was the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, each probably hoping that Jesus would say his name. But Jesus called over a small child and told them that they would need to become like her to enter heaven. Their dreams of personal glory were crushed when Jesus said, “Whoever humbles himself like this child is the greatest in the kingdom of heaven.”

What was it about the child or about children generally that made Jesus use one as an example? Was it an inherent characteristic of purity? Was it innocence born of plain inexperience? Was it the child’s unquestioned commitment to her own individuality and her inscrutable alignment with lived reality?

It’s misleading to suggest that Jesus would have overlooked the sinful nature of the child just because of her age, attributing some ambiguous trait of goodness to her in order to make a point. We tend to talk about babies and kids as having some kind of special “purity,” a perception which seems to be a transmutation of their intellectual naivete to their moral condition, but their innocence is more experiential than spiritual, since the Bible teaches that children are born in sin (Genesis 8:21; Psalm 51:5). It’s clear from these and other Old Testament passages, with which Jesus would have been familiar, that since Adam, all are born sinful. But what exactly does this mean?

The doctrine of original sin refers not to the original sin, the eating of the apple, but to the condition of sin which mankind has been subject to ever since. The Old Testament passages mentioned above attest to the concept that no one, not even a newborn baby, can escape this inheritance of fallenness, and Paul clarifies this doctrine in Romans 5. An erroneous way of conceptualizing this would be to say that yes, we all have a sinful nature, but it’s latent until each individual actually sins (meaning babies and small children could be sinless). There are several ways to refute this argument, but the fundamental error here is in thinking of sin only as an individual choice, rather than as an ontological category. In other words, if sin is a human condition inherited from Adam, then it isn’t what we do, but who we are. As one theologian put it, the fall and the consequent corruption of human nature resulted in “an inherent positive disposition toward sin.” The potential for sin that we see in Adam and Eve in the garden becomes a proclivity to sin in their offspring.

Entire tomes have been written on the doctrine of original sin, but the basic application for the purposes of this article is that children are no purer than adults. They are no more attuned to their “authentic” selves, except perhaps in the sense that they are freshly encountering sin in ways that adults have become desensitized to.

Why Does Jesus Praise Childlike Humility?

So if Jesus wasn’t praising the sinlessness or moral purity of the child in Matthew 18, then what was he praising? The way I learned this Bible story focused on the phrase “like a child,” which emphasized being childlike in innocence or in dependence upon God; however, that interpretation misses the object of the comparison, which Jesus explicitly states in the same verse: humility. True humility means seeing oneself correctly, not simply seeing oneself as arbitrarily inferior, and in ancient Jewish culture, children were unimportant; they had no rights and were viewed like property in some sense. Jesus is acknowledging the child’s humility, which comes from accepting that her powerlessness and social insignificance are essential factors of life.

If you have children (who seem to have a tendency toward temper tantrums, sneakiness, and mutiny), you may find fault with the suggestion that children are in some way “naturally” humble or that this quality in children was worthy of Jesus’s special attention. But remember that Jesus is not equating humility with blamelessness (although a child’s conceptualization of their own lack of power or influence may restrain their proclivity to active sin). Humility is less a negation of our fallen nature than an acceptance of it and of the given order of things, including our impotence when it comes to sin and our absolute need for God. I submit that what Jesus was praising in the child in Matthew 18 was her lack of subversiveness rather than her lack of sin; she accepted her own limitations.

Little children, while they may not understand sin or its relationship to their selves, do know all about wanting to have their own way. Jesus teaches not that children are sinless, but that they’re in a special category when it comes to their vulnerability. They may not be exempt from sin, but they are inexperienced with it, and woe to the one who initiates them into its wicked ways! The society that soft-sells the false teaching of the purity of children’s desires in order to feed the beasts of subjective self-determination and moral relativism has been warned (Matthew 18:6).

Jesus, the Only Hope for Sinful Children and Sinful Adults—Especially Parents

What most strikes me about the passage in Matthew 18 is the absolutely stunning paradox Jesus weaves as he manages to simultaneously honor and humble the child. What Jesus does here, he does consistently throughout his ministry: he treats all human beings lovingly, with the dignity of being image-bearers of his Father, while keeping them in their proper place as created beings and sinners. He demonstrates his scandalous love for the child within a culture that did not highly value her, but without idolizing children or their so-called innocence. He calls the child “like” the greatest in the kingdom of heaven, but that title actually belongs to him—the humblest of all (Philippians 2:6–8).

Like other vulnerable groups that Scripture repeatedly identifies—lepers, widows, the poor, etc.—Jesus specially distinguished and ministered to children. Despite the dearth of biblical passages where Jesus speaks of or interacts with children, his tenderness toward them is easy to perceive. He defended them against his disciples’ wishes and he even said that to welcome a little child was to welcome him (Matthew 18:5). Although children aren’t sinless, their vulnerability and the humility that often comes hand in hand with it are qualities about them that Jesus seems to particularly cherish.

Our goal as parents should be to proclaim and imitate Jesus’s love and humility and to model it for our children. The great news in response to original sin is that salvation comes to us the same way: through one man, and not because of any deserving action of our own (Romans 5:12–19). And this undeserved salvation radically transforms our identity and being. So our discipline of them should include both accepting the corrupted nature that they have inherited as well as honoring the very special place they hold in God’s heart. Because of the former, we shouldn’t be surprised when they misbehave. A mentor of mine, the wife of a deacon at our church, advised me that asking, “Why did you do that?” is not a helpful question when kids act up. Instead of being surprised at our kids’ sin, we should be prepared for it. We should be prepared to explain why disobedience requires discipline with a simple statement like the following: “I’m teaching you to obey and respect me as your earthly parent so you will obey and respect the good Father who loves you most.”

Even a year-old baby can understand “no” or a flick on the cheek. At every age, my mentor told me, you have to consider your child’s development. They may not be emotionally or intellectually ready to understand discipline, but you can still “get their attention.” And each time you do that you are training them to turn that attention to God’s law. A piece of parenting wisdom I gleaned at a recent women’s retreat is to talk to your kids about the people in the Bible as if they are your ancestors, because they are part of the family of faith. One thing that does is show children that adults and even “heroes of the faith” sin, but they can choose to repent, and are still loved by God.

Relationship is key when it comes to discipline. We are born in sin, but we are adopted into the family of God. The disciples don’t seem to get Jesus’s point in Matthew 18, because in the next chapter, they rebuke people for bringing children to Jesus to be blessed by him. “Do not hinder them,” Jesus says, “for the kingdom of heaven belongs to such as these.” The Bible doesn’t say who brought the children to Jesus’s knee, but I’d assume it was their parents. Our job as parents is not to hinder our children’s journey to Jesus, but to facilitate it. In doing so, we must hold both truths: that children are sinners, and that they are models for us—dependent on, humble before, and beloved by God.