Sin Makes No Racial Distinctions (pt. 2) by John H. Gerstner

Reinhold Niebuhr, America's distinguished neo-orthodox theologian, lectured to the students and faculty of Harvard Divinity School in 1940. He was discussing original sin and gave this domestic illustration. He son, who was then seven, had been in a neighborhood brawl. Niebuhr was inclined to finish what the boys had begun, but the maid interceded. "Professor Niebuhr," she said, "it is not your son's fault. It is the company he keeps." The father replied, "It is not the company he keeps. It is his own little black heart."
What shows the iniquity of man most clearly of all is that infants themselves are contaminated with sin. Before babies learn how to think, speak, or act responsibly, they are by nature children of wrath. The Bible shows this first of all inferentially; that is, it teaches clearly that the wages of sin is death. Where there is no sin, there would be no death. If there were no sin, there would be no suffering; yet babies both suffer and die. Sometimes they suffer dreadfully and sometimes they die in agony. And John Wesley said, "Therefore children themselves are not innocent before God. They suffer, therefore they deserve to suffer." Or as the Lutheran theologian Sohnius put it, "Since infants die, as universal experience teaches, it is evident that they must be chargeable with sin; for Paul clearly represents sin as the cause of death--of the death of all men. 'For the wages of sin is death.' " John Calvin said, "We are by nature the children of wrath. But God does not condemn the innocent. Therefore, . . . ." And so Calvin argues that God's calling our natures guiltily corrupt proves that we are corrupt and, at the same time, responsible for our native corruption.
Some moderns have jumped to the conclusion that there is no necessary connection between sin and suffering and death. They do this because our Lord has told us that there is no necessary connection between a particular sin and a particular suffering. A calamity coming upon a particular person is no proof that the person is a greater sinner than one on whom that particular calamity did not come. But Christ nowhere says that suffering is unconnected with sin, or that there would be death where there was no sin.
Continuing with the sinfulness of infants, we call attention to the divinely commanded execution of some Midianite children, mentioned in Numbers 31:17. Moses there commanded the Israelites to slay all of the male children, as Saul was commanded on a later occasion to slay all the infants of the Amalekites in 1 Samuel 15:3. In Psalm 137:9 we read, "Happy shall he be that taketh and dasheth thy little ones against the stones." In his Great Christian Doctrine of Original Sin, Jonathan Edwards said, "I proceed to take notice of something remarkable concerning the destruction of Jerusalem, represented in Ezekiel 9, when command was given [to them that had charge over the city] to destroy the inhabitants (verses 1-8). And this reason is given for it, that their iniquity required it, and it was a just recompense of their sin (verses 9-10). God, at the same time, was most particular and exact in His care that such as had proved by their behavior that they were not partakers in the abominations of the city should by no means be involved in the slaughter. Command was given to the angel to go through the city and set a mark upon their foreheads, and the destroying angel had a strict charge not to come near any man on whom was the mark; yet the infants were not marked nor a word said of sparing them. On the contrary, infants were expressly mentioned as those that should be utterly destroyed, without pity (verses 5-6). 'Go through the city and smite; let not your eye spare, neither have ye pity. Slay utterly old and young, both maids and little children; but come not near any man upon whom is the mark.' "
Sodom would have been spared by God if there had been ten righteous; since there must have been ten infants, these could not have been righteous. We read in Proverbs 22:15: "Foolishness is bound up in the heart of a child; but the rod of correction shall drive it far from him." Matthew 18:11 says that the Son of man came "to save that which is lost." If therefore children who die are saved, as many believe, it is from a lost condition by nature.
Not only do the above passages teach us that any unconverted person is exposed to wrath, but they also teach that it is absolutely certain to come upon him. The expression "children of wrath" was a Hebrew idiom. It meant that the person so described was inevitably liable to wrath. It was an idiomatic way of saying what Paul says more conventionally in Romans 9, where he speaks of "vessels of wrath fitted to destruction." The expression "son of stripes" in Deuteronomy 25:2 is used to signify one who is to be beaten. The expression "son of death" in 2 Samuel 12:5 is used of one who is certain to die. Remember that Christ referred to Judas as "the son of perdition," the heir of hell, the one certain to receive that dread destiny. In Ephesians 2:2 Paul shows that the unconverted person is already under the "prince of the power of the air." Every soul is the habitation of unclean spirits, precisely because by nature he is a child of wrath.
So we have seen from the Ephesians text, from other statements of Scripture, from biblical references to "man" as being virtually synonymous with "sinner" and worse than an animal and more like a devil, from the lost condition even of babies, and from the inevitability of punishment that the unconverted are by nature--not by environment, and without respect to persons of distinction of race--children of wrath.