This week’s Torah portion Ki Tisa, "When You Take," begins after the altar of incense is made, which has incense burned every day; this smell is holy and not to be burned anywhere but in God’s presence. Atonement for sin is made on its horns once a year. Then, people give a ransom for their lives, and then the next section is about priests washing to be clean before God in the bronze basin. All of this has to do with holiness and cleanliness before God.
How does this apply to babies?
The section I would like to focus on in this blog is about the Temple tax:
Exodus 30:11-16, “The Lord said to Moses, ‘When you take the census of the people of Israel, then each shall give a ransom for his life to the Lord when you number them, that there be no plague among them when you number them. Each one who is numbered in the census shall give this: half a shekel according to the shekel of the sanctuary (the shekel is twenty gerahs), half a shekel as an offering to the Lord. Everyone who is numbered in the census, from twenty years old and upward, shall give the Lord's offering. The rich shall not give more, and the poor shall not give less, than the half shekel, when you give the Lord's offering to make atonement for your lives. You shall take the atonement money from the people of Israel and shall give it for the service of the tent of meeting, that it may bring the people of Israel to remembrance before the Lord, so as to make atonement for your lives” (ESV).
The plague and the ransom are all for those ages 20 years and up. This is exactly like those who were not allowed in the Promise Land and had to die in the desert when the people of Israel first arrived and doubted. We are all born with sin, Romans 5:12-14, “Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death through sin, and so death spread to all men[e] because all sinned— for sin indeed was in the world before the law was given, but sin is not counted where there is no law. Yet death reigned from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sinning was not like the transgression of Adam, who was a type of the one who was to come” (ESV).
It does not take a lot to make the jump that God has an age of accountability.
If you would like more on this topic, I have a previously published article, “’for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God,’ How Can that be Said?”
Or Dr. David Taylor's Rumble video Is My Baby In Heaven?
I hope this blesses you, have a great week.