Innocency

Innocency in Scripture is not a temperament but a standing — a person's relation to a charge, a wound, or a defiled altar. It begins as the unselfconscious nakedness of the garden, becomes a ritual gesture when blood is spilled outside the city gate, and lives on as the protest of the righteous sufferer who insists that no fault has been found in him. The same vocabulary that names the standing also names its loss: guilt, guile, iniquity borne upon a soul.

The Garden Contrast

Innocency first appears as a state Scripture barely has to describe. "And they were both naked, the man and his wife, and were not ashamed" (Gen 2:25). What follows in the next chapter is the entire vocabulary of guilt by reverse: opened eyes, sewn aprons, hiding among the trees, the question "Where are you?" answered by "I was afraid, because I was naked; and I hid myself" (Gen 3:7-11). Every later use of the word presupposes this loss; innocency is what nakedness without shame felt like before the fig-leaves.

Washing the Hands

When Israel cannot find the killer of a man slain in the open country, the elders of the nearest city break a heifer's neck in an uncultivated valley and "wash their hands over the heifer" (Deut 21:6). The gesture is not hygiene — it is a public, ritual disavowal of bloodguilt. The Psalmist takes the same gesture into worship: "I will wash my hands in innocence: So I will go about your altar, O Yahweh" (Ps 26:6). And he names the qualification the gesture stands for — "He who has innocent hands, and a pure heart; Who has not lifted up his soul to falsehood, And has not sworn deceitfully" (Ps 24:3-4).

The gesture can also be exposed as empty. Asaph, watching the prosperity of the wicked, complains that the rite has bought him nothing: "Surely in vain I have cleansed my heart, And washed my hands in innocence" (Ps 73:13).

The Protest of the Righteous

Innocency in the mouths of biblical sufferers is a plea against false accusation. Daniel, drawn from the lions' pit, gives the verdict: "My God has sent his angel, and has shut the lions' mouths, and they have not hurt me; since before him innocence was found in me; and also before you, O king, I have done no hurt" (Dan 6:22). The Maccabean fathers, refusing to fight on the Sabbath, take the protest into death: "Let us all die in our innocency: and heaven and earth will be witnesses for us, that you⁺ put us to death wrongfully" (1Ma 2:37). Mattathias, dying, lists Daniel in the same line: "Daniel in his innocency Was delivered out of the mouth of the lions" (1Ma 2:60).

The protest is also a prayer. The Psalmist asks to be kept from the sins he might commit unawares: "Keep back your slave also from presumptuous [sins]; Don't let them have dominion over me: Then I will be upright, And I will be innocent from great transgression" (Ps 19:13). Jesus, surveying Nathaniel, names the same standing in a single man: "Look, an Israelite indeed, in whom is no guile!" (John 1:47). Of his own messianic servant Peter writes the antitype: "who did no sin, neither was guile found in his mouth" (1 Pet 2:22).

When the Plea Is False

Jeremiah's word against Judah refuses an innocency that the speaker has only asserted. "Yet you said, I am innocent; surely his anger has turned away from me. Look, I will enter into judgment with you, because you say, I haven't sinned" (Jer 2:35). Innocency claimed in the absence of fact provokes the very judgment it tries to deflect.

Underneath the claim runs the steady drumbeat of Levitical guiltiness. The eater of stale peace-offering "will bear his iniquity" (Lev 7:18); so will the man who refuses to wash after contact with a carcass (Lev 17:16), the eater of the holy thing past its day (Lev 19:8), the one who uncovers near kin (Lev 20:19), the soul who trespasses against Yahweh (Num 5:6), the despiser of the word (Num 15:31), the husband who nullifies a vow after he has heard it (Num 30:15), and the Levites who went astray after idols (Ezek 44:10). "Bear his iniquity" is the reverse face of "innocence was found in me."

Conviction and Remorse

Where the rite of washing fails, conviction begins from inside. Joseph's brothers in Egypt, twenty years after the pit, suddenly hear themselves: "We are truly guilty concerning our brother, in that we saw the distress of his soul, when he pled with us for mercy, and we would not hear; therefore is this distress come upon us" (Gen 42:21). Pharaoh, under the seventh plague, concedes for a moment: "I have sinned this time: Yahweh is righteous, and I and my people are wicked" (Exod 9:27). Israel after the serpents asks Moses to pray (Num 21:7); the people after Kadesh "mourned greatly" (Num 14:39); David after the census takes the whole weight: "It is I who have sinned and done very wickedly; but these sheep, what have they done?" (1 Chr 21:17). Ezra, hearing of the foreign marriages, cannot lift his face: "for our iniquities are increased over our head, and our guiltiness has grown up to the heavens" (Ezra 9:6).

The Psalmist gives the inward physiology of the same experience. "When I kept silent, my bones wasted away Through my groaning all the day long" (Ps 32:3); "For my iniquities have gone over my head: As a heavy burden they are too heavy for me" (Ps 38:4); "For innumerable evils have surrounded me; My iniquities have overtaken me, so that I am not able to look up" (Ps 40:12); "For I know my transgressions; And my sin is ever before me" (Ps 51:3); "For my heart was grieved, And I was pricked in my inward parts" (Ps 73:21). Jesus names the source of the pressure: "And he, when he has come, will convict the world in respect of sin, and of righteousness, and of judgment" (John 16:8).

Hebrews warns that remorse can come too late, fixing on Esau "who for one meal sold his own birthright. For you⁺ know that even when he afterward desired to inherit the blessing, he was rejected; for he found no place for repentance, though he sought it diligently with tears" (Heb 12:16-17).

The Spotless Life

The innocency the New Testament names is not the recovered nakedness of Eden but a holiness that the Spirit produces and the gospel demands. The charge to Timothy is brief: "Lay hands hastily on no man, neither share in other men's sins: keep yourself pure" (1 Tim 5:22). Its goal is older: "But the end of the charge is love out of a pure heart and a good conscience and faith unfeigned" (1 Tim 1:5). Peter binds purity to obedience: "Seeing you⁺ have purified your⁺ souls in your⁺ obedience to the truth to unfeigned love of the brothers, love one another fervently from a pure heart" (1 Pet 1:22).

The figure that runs through this strand is the unblemished offering. Job is promised a face "without spot" if he puts away iniquity (Job 11:15); the bride of the Song is told, "You are entirely beautiful, my love; And there is no spot in you" (Song 4:7); the Psalmist who without guile is the man "to whom Yahweh does not impute iniquity" (Ps 32:2). James defines religion as keeping oneself "unspotted from the world" (Jas 1:27). Peter charges the church to "be diligent that you⁺ may be found in peace, without spot and blameless in his sight" (2 Pet 3:14). Paul gives the picture its end: a church presented to its head "not having spot or wrinkle or any such thing; but that it should be holy and without blemish" (Eph 5:27). And the redeemed of the Apocalypse stand at last with the same description in their mouths: "And in their mouth was found no lie: they are without blemish" (Rev 14:5).