Some senior members of my adult Sun school class have raised this image of a violent OT God, reminding me (perhaps with a touch of cynicism) that, they too, have undergone much suffering in their personal lives (loss of a spouse, financial bankruptcy etc). I gently remind them that our God is a God of love first before being a God of vengeance. While they are shocked when I relate to them live pagan babies being thrown into the fire or dashed against the altar stones as sacrifice to Molech/Baal, they cannot seem to make the connection and somehow even feel God is being unfair. Finally, I make an appeal to Job's ultimate surrender to God's sovereignty, which they seem to accept grudgingly. At this point I just pray to the Holy Spirit for everyone's enlightenment, and move on to the next topic.

Pat answers which are oblivious to the obvious do not satisfy the thinking soul. Answers to evil include Romans 8 where Paul concludes the suffering of this age is incomparable to the bliss of ages eternal. While the finite cannot grasp the infinite, we understand justice where finite evil is trumped by infinite good, but we struggle with the converse where a few years of sin is met with eternal conscious torment. If we are honest, it does not sit well with our new, God created hearts. Some say the victims of God's genocide went to eternal bliss if they were less than 13 years old, but to eternal torture if older, making God into a Monstrous Cosmic Cook. Some are dogmatic that there is no hope beyond the grave despite scant Scriptural support, weak subjective interpretation and other verses to the contrary. To say we just need to accept God’s sovereignty only leaves us with the option of believing Him but not liking Him very much. We still need better answers.

This article makes some good points, but I suspect that it doesn't actually address the question the author's daughter was asking. Almost no one objects to God punishing the perpetrators of the Holocaust, child abusers, etc. What is problematic about the wars of the Old Testament is that the Israelites were commanded to completely wipe out everyone. They were obligated, by God, to kill parents in front of their children, tear infants out of the arms of their mothers, execute those who begged for mercy, etc. This article makes some good points but it bemoans evil acts of the past (e.g., things that happened during the Holocaust) while neglecting to address why God ordered his own people to carry out equivalent acts of evil on others.

The other possible reality is that the God of the Old Testament was symbolic from the outset and an part of the subconscious at work in order to maintain the simple existence of the Hebrew people at a time when tribalism was dominant and losing a battle could lead to the end of your civilization. If you take it literal, you're gonna go nuts.

I don't struggle with God's judgment of unrepentant sinners, or with God's mercy towards repentant sinners. What I struggle with is the Evangelical Christian view that God's judgment is eternal, while the sins of those who have not repented are temporal. Is God so holy that all sin demand eternal death? Coming to Christ from nearly 20 years as a Jew by choice; where the view is that one automatically has a share in the World to Come, but can lose that share through sin, I find a harshness in the response of many Christians to any form of universal reconciliation - even when that is not expressed as universalism but is placed solely at the foot of the cross. From what I know about language, I have no issues with God's love and mercy being eternal, but God's judgment being for just an age. There is no reason the Greek word in the New Testament has to be one or the other but not both by context. All we can do is trust in Christ and remember that God does all things for good.