According to Ezekiel 18:23-32, God doesn’t enjoy punishing the wicked but has to for the sake of justice for their victims; however, God will show mercy to those who repent. Similar ideas can be found in Isaiah 57:15-21, Jeremiah 18:1-10, Ezekiel 33:10-12, 33:17-20, Psalms 7:1-17, and Psalms 32:1-11. The Bible says we humans are born with sin nature that we inherited from Adam the first human (Rom 5:12-17), so if God destroys all evil, then that would include all people (Isa 57:16) because no one is “good” according to God’s definition of good. Jesus even says this in Matt 19:17, Mark 10:18, and Luke 18:19. One problem is that extremists keep redefining God through one extreme or another. One side looks at the Flood story, or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and says God is a destructive, bloodthirsty maniac. The other side looks at God’s love and mercy through Jesus in the New Testament and thinks sin does not matter, so we are all free to live as degenerate heathens because of his mercy. Even though sin was such a big deal, Christ had to die for us because sin requires death.
The Bible frames God as one who must balance both Justice and Mercy. When the first humans, Adam and Eve, sinned, they were kicked out of the Garden. God placed Cherubim (heavenly creatures) to guard the garden and prevent humans from getting back in. This prevented humans from accessing the Tree of Life (Gen 3:22-24). Why did God do this? Imagine if he let humans have eternal life after sin, the scenario we see play out is that humans become so violent that God has to flood the world to stop us from going extinct (Gen 6:11). Why would a loving God allow an endless cycle of immortal violence? Adding Death to tailor sin’s effects was necessary; we NEEDED DEATH because SIN WAS SO BAD. If humans went extinct, God’s promise to save humanity from Satan and sin in Genesis 3:15 would not have happened.
God has to balance mercy and justice. Mercy preserves God’s children and creation, but having all mercy means evil runs wild forever. So God has to execute justice after his mercy is exhausted, which means every evil being is ultimately stopped. If he only did one and not the other, then God would have destroyed everything in judgment, or evil would have corrupted all things in mercy. On a localized scale, we sow we reap (Gal 6:7-8), and the wage of sin is death (Rom 6:23). Since everyone has inherited sin nature from Adam (Rom 5:12-17, 1 Cor 15:22), then everyone dies.
The great deluge in Noah’s time was the closest God came to destroying all evil on earth, yet evil is still here because even Noah’s family wasn’t perfect, because as humans who descend from Adam, they too are corrupted by sin. He showed Noah’s family mercy by having him build the Ark to survive the flood. This was because of Noah’s faithfulness and righteousness, but he and his family still died eventually because of their sins. He continues to show mercy to people today, both those in a relationship with him and those who aren’t (Matt 5:43-48). However, when mercy runs out, he will eventually separate the wheat [righteous] from the tares [wicked] (Matt 3:12, Matt 13:24-30). So God allows bad things to happen for justice’s sake, because we deserve destruction, but because he promised to save us, he must allow us to live long enough for at least a remnant of us to receive His mercy and salvation.
Like Noah’s flood, the Israelites in the wilderness didn’t all experience God’s promise. God promised to Abraham to give the nation that descends from him, the Israelites, the land of Canaan and make them a beacon of light to all nations. Unfortunately, only a portion of them inherited that promise. Many of them died in the wilderness because of their sin, and only a remnant got to go into Canaan. Furthermore, when the Israelites lost their land, it was because they broke their end of the covenant (Deut ch. 28). One-third of Judea was exiled when Babylon conquered them in the second siege, and the other two-thirds of them were killed, which fulfilled Ezekiel’s prophecy (Ez 5:1-13).
God never promised to save everyone on earth, only those who belong to him (John 10:1-16), and keep his commandments (John 14:15, 1 John 5:1-3). He makes it clear in John 3:16-21 that those who don’t believe in him will be condemned because they love the darkness more than the light. Since sin is in the word sin is the reason we all die, he made a promise of salvation from sin so that we can have eternal life. Death is good and bad. It sucks because God didn’t initially create things to die, but it’s necessary to keep sin from going on forever. That is why God kicked Adam and Eve out of the garden to prevent them from getting eternal life and sinning forever (Gen 3:22-24).
Death and all the things that cause it are permitted because sin needs to be destroyed. However, because he doesn’t want to destroy his righteous people, he shows mercy whenever he can so people can repent (change their mind and turn to God’s ways), for as long as he is willing. In addition, Isa 57:1-2 makes an interesting point: the righteous who die early are being spared the suffering of a major judgment, so, even in tragedy, we see a form of mercy being extended.
Isaiah 57:1 Good people pass away; the godly often die before their time. But no one seems to care or wonder why. No one seems to understand that God is protecting them from the evil to come. 2 For those who follow godly paths will rest in peace when they die.
Some will challenge the idea of mercy being in the flood story because babies, both born and unborn, would have died. However, the violence of the pre-flood world would have included child sacrifice, so those babies were going to die anyway. If there is only one family that is willing to trust God, then it is impractical for them to raise all the babies, both born and unborn. God did what was necessary to allow humans to survive before it got so bad that we would have gone extinct. Everything that happens in our world is the best possible outcome because God has limited his intervention so that we can survive long enough to qualify for mercy instead of the condemnation that we deserve.