Can God be both Just and Merciful?

Is God a God of justice? Or is He a God of mercy? Are those two things mutually exclusive? It seems that whichever direction we go with this, God is accused of doing wrong.

Many have claimed that the God of the Old Testament was mean, capricious, vindictive, petty, unjust and much, much more. This usually stems from passages having to do with the flood, the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, the cleansing of the Promised Land of other nations and tribes, etc.

People will refer to these parts of the Bible and claim that God is a horrible, mean, violent deity. So much so that some people will claim that, even if they were convinced that this God exists, they would not follow such a being. They simply don't like Him. They don't believe such a God exists, but hate Him anyway.

How Could God Let This Happen?

Last week, we looked at why God allows pain and suffering, classically referred to as the logical "Problem of Evil." This challenge attempts to present the existence of evil as evidence that an all-good, all-loving, all-powerful God is impossible because the claim is that both evil and God are contradictory and therefore they could not both exist.

Today, we are going to look at the more difficult side of this idea of God and evil or suffering. The other aspect of this challenge has less to do with the logical compatibility of God and a world in which there is evil and more to do with how people can reconcile their faith in God when they, or people they know and love, go through extremely difficult and painful events.

Where is God in the Pain, Suffering and Evil?

Throughout the years, the single biggest question that people have about God is some version of the question "How could a loving God allow so much suffering in the world?" That being the case, I thought that would probably be the best question to start this new site with. So, let's take a look at this very important question.

First, I think it's important to make a distinction with this question. As much as this question comes up, there tend to be two completely different reasons why people will ask about God and suffering. The first is usually the result of some sort of tragedy that has occurred that has either directly affected someone or has had a significant impact on them. Think, for example, of the Sandy Hook shootings...most of us were not directly affected by that, but the gravity of that event shook us all.