God of Justice and Mercy

The Temptation of a Purely Vengeful God

A first reduction makes God a cold judge, quick to punish, watching for the sinner the way a clerk watches for a mistake. Such a God paralyzes consciences, produces terror rather than filial love, and ends up driving souls away instead of drawing them. He is the Old Testament caricature that the adversaries of Christianity have never ceased to wave about: a capricious oriental tyrant.

This caricature misses several obvious facts. The Old Testament itself — where God's anger is omnipresent — is the same book that proclaims that the Lord is good and his love endures forever (Ps 117(118):1 — 117 in the Vulgate, 118 in the Hebrew), that prophesies a meek and humble Messiah, that shows a God who prefers mercy to sacrifice (Hos 6:6). Divine anger, in the Bible, is never an arbitrary passion; it is the reaction of Holiness to sin — which is something quite different.

The Temptation of a Purely Indulgent God

The second reduction — more widespread in contemporary preaching — erases justice in favor of a mercy without demands. God forgives everything, always, no matter what. Sin is not serious. Hell is a metaphor. Justice is outdated.

This vision, however seductive, is profoundly unjust — toward victims first. A judge who, on the day of the verdict, says to the murderer of an entire family: “You may go, I am rather merciful” — we are indignant. And we are right. A God incapable of being indignant at evil would not be good: he would be an indifferent God. And indifference is the opposite of love.

It also impoverishes Mercy itself. If God forgives “anyway,” without it costing anyone anything, then Christ's Cross is emptied of meaning. If justice is in God, the penalty due to sin must be paid — that is Saint Anselm's argument — and that is precisely what Christ accomplished, out of Love.^[1]

The Classic Definition: Rendering to Each What Is Due

Saint Thomas Aquinas, taking up the formula of the Roman jurist Ulpian, defines justice as “a perpetual and constant will to render to each his right.”^[2] The Catechism of the Catholic Church takes up this definition: “Justice is the moral virtue which consists in the constant and firm will to give their due to God and neighbor.”^[3]

Justice therefore implies two inseparable things: rewarding good and punishing evil. A justice that would reward only one while ignoring the other would not be true justice. Scripture is explicit on this point:

“He who justifies the wicked and he who condemns the righteous are both alike an abomination to the Lord.” — Proverbs 17:15^[4]

This formula may surprise by its harshness. It means that acquitting the guilty is itself an injustice: it disregards the victim, it trivializes evil, it lies about reality. A court that acquits without reason is not merciful — it is corrupt.

Divine Justice Bears on Sinful Man

Applying this truth to the state of humanity is dreadful. Saint Paul says it bluntly: “None is righteous, no, not one” (Rom 3:10). “All have sinned and fall short of the glory of God” (Rom 3:23). The wages of sin is death — and not only physical death, but separation from God.^[5]

Jesus himself teaches that anger is no less unjust than murder (Mt 5:22), that whoever insults his brother will be liable to judgment — and he does not soften it: “he shall be liable to the hell of fire.”^[6] If we are honest with ourselves — and Saint John says that claiming to have no sin is deceiving ourselves (1 Jn 1:8) — we recognize that we deserve this penalty.

Saint Thomas is categorical: “Mortal sin deserves the eternal punishment of hell.”^[7] God, in his justice, could very well have left man to his just retribution after original sin — and he would have remained perfectly just. This point is fundamental for grasping the unheard-of character of Mercy.

God “Feels Indignation Every Day”: Divine Anger in the Bible

The biblical vocabulary of divine anger is omnipresent, in the Old as in the New Testament. “God is a righteous judge, God feels indignation every day,” sings Psalm 7 (v. 12).^[8] Saint Paul, far from correcting this picture, confirms the reality of “the wrath of God” against all that opposes holiness (Rom 1:18; Rom 2:5–8).

Some — above all since the nineteenth century — have tried to explain these texts away as pure anthropomorphisms to be outgrown. But this hermeneutic stumbles on an obstacle: Jesus himself speaks of judgment, hell, perdition — in terms often more precise and more severe than the prophets (Mt 10:28; Mt 25:41; Mk 9:43–48). The New Testament does not tone down divine justice; it gives it its definitive face.

God's anger is a theological reality — not the emotional passion of a frustrated human being, but the expression of divine holiness in the face of sin. It is the manifestation, in time, of what God eternally is: holy, true, just. “Is God unjust to inflict wrath?” asks Paul. And he answers himself: “By no means!” (Rom 3:5–6)^[9]

Finally, the Church's constant catechesis teaches that God is a just judge who rewards good and punishes evil — a truth recalled by the Council of Trent (session 6, decree on justification, ch. 16) and taken up by the Catechism (§§ 1021, 1039).^[10]

If God Is Good, He Must Hate Evil

Here is the key to understanding why God's anger is good news: loving something necessarily implies hating what destroys it. A father who loves his children must be indignant at pedophilia. Someone who loves the Jewish people must abhor the Shoah. It would be morally aberrant to say: “Auschwitz? Oh, I see no problem. I am a rather positive person.”

Jesus formulates it directly to Luisa Piccarreta:

“To love something, it is absolutely necessary to hate the things opposed to it.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, Volume 7, April 29, 1906^[11]

And the Eternal Father to Saint Catherine of Siena:

“Light is acquired through the true knowledge the soul has of itself, and from this knowledge comes holy hatred of darkness.” — The Eternal Father to Saint Catherine of Siena, The Dialogue, ch. CXLV, §14^[12]

Because God loves man — with an infinite love — he can only be indignant at all that wounds him, destroys him, deprives him of happiness. It is because he is Love that he is Just. To remove God's anger is to mutilate his love.

A God Who Felt No Indignation Would Not Be Loving

Imagine a court where a judge, feeling particularly benevolent that day, pardons the murderer of an entire family. The victims' families would be devastated. And they would be right to be indignant: such “mercy” is an injustice toward the victims. It denies their suffering. It trivializes their death. It implicitly says their lives did not count enough to be avenged.

Likewise, a God incapable of being indignant at evil would not be a God of love. He would be a God of indifference. The Eternal Father himself, in his message to Mother Eugenia Ravasio (a private revelation, not declared supernatural by the Church), gives the measure of what divine mercy holds back:

“If My Heart were not made so, I would already have exterminated the world as many times as it committed sin! Whereas, as you yourselves witness, at every instant My protection manifests itself through graces and benefits.” — God the Father to Mother Eugenia Ravasio, Message of Our Father, first notebook, July 1, 1932^[13]

God Suffers at Having to Punish

And here is perhaps the most overwhelming point: divine anger, though real, is not cold. God suffers at having to deploy his justice. He does not deploy it with satisfaction — he does so reluctantly, compelled by the very love that wills the salvation of souls.

“Conform yourself to My Justice, for I can no longer hold it back. Ah! Man is too ungrateful! On every side, he compels Me to punish him. He himself tears punishments from My hands. If you knew how I suffer when I deploy My Justice. But it is man himself who forces Me.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, Volume 3, November 13, 1899^[14]

And a few weeks earlier:

“O man, how I love you! If you knew how it grieves Me to have to punish you! But My Justice obliges Me to it.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, Volume 2, March 14, 1899^[15]

This God who suffers at punishing is not the vengeful God of the caricature. He is a father — a father who, because he loves his son, cannot leave his bad behavior unpunished. He suffers at having to be severe, but he is severe because he loves.

“What obliges Me to punish men is the infinite Love I have for them and which desires that all be saved.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, Volume 2, October 24, 1899^[16]

Definition: Not Inflicting the Deserved Punishment

If justice consists in rendering to each what is due to him, mercy is love that goes beyond the due. Saint Thomas defines it as the sorrow of a heart confronted with another's misery, which impels it to remedy it — and in God, this sorrow becomes a movement toward the other by pure grace, not by debt.^[17]

Mercy, in the order of strict justice, is not obligatory. A creditor is not bound to remit a debt; a judge is not obliged to pardon. Saint Paul is categorical: after original sin, God was in no way compelled to forgive. His justice did not oblige him to it:

“What shall we say then? Is there injustice on God's part? By no means! [...] So then he has mercy upon whomever he wills, and he hardens the heart of whomever he wills.” — Saint Paul, Romans 9:14, 18^[18]

Divine Mercy is therefore pure grace — an unheard-of gift, deserved by no one, granted out of pure love. This gratuitousness is the whole of its greatness.

Mercy Surpasses Justice

Saint Thomas Aquinas teaches that mercy is the greatest of God's works — not because it cancels justice, but because it surpasses it from above: “The work of divine mercy rises above justice, since it gives it more than justice requires.”^[19]

The psalmist sings this surpassing: “Mercy and Truth have met, Justice and Peace have embraced” (Ps 84(85):11 — 84 in the Vulgate, 85 in the Hebrew).^[20] These four figures — Mercy, Truth, Justice, Peace — do not exclude one another in God's design: they meet, they embrace. It is this kiss that the whole history of salvation prepares.

“The flames of mercy burn Me. I want to pour them out upon souls.” — Jesus to Saint Faustina, Diary, §50^[21]

“It is only that I want to punish the earth. Being on good terms with even a single person disarms Me and I no longer have the strength to set punishments in motion.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, Volume 3, March 15, 1900^[22]

The Parable of the Workers of the Eleventh Hour

The Gospel of Matthew (20:1–16) gives a striking illustration of how mercy surpasses justice without contradicting it. A master hires workers at dawn, promising them a denarius for the day. He hires others at nine o'clock, at noon, at three, then at five in the evening. When payment time comes, he begins with the last and gives them... a denarius. The first, who have “borne the burden of the day and the scorching heat,” expect more. But they receive the same denarius.

Their protest is legitimate by the standard of strict justice. The master's answer is decisive: “Friend, I am doing you no wrong; did you not agree with me for a denarius? [...] Am I not allowed to do what I choose with what belongs to me? Or do you begrudge my generosity?” (Mt 20:13–15)^[23]

The lesson is precise: the master is just — he gives each what had been agreed. But he has the right to be more than just with those he chooses. His generosity overflows justice without violating it. He takes nothing from anyone; he gives more to some — as a pure gift. This is the very image of divine Mercy: it does not abolish justice, it transcends it.

This table sums up the Gospel paradox: mercy does not wrong justice — it overflows it. And whoever envies divine generosity reveals that he has reduced God to an accountant.

A Fundamental Theological Knot

The real difficulty — and it is the one Saint Anselm of Canterbury expounds at length in his Cur Deus Homo (Why a God-Man?, 1098) — is this: if God wills to forgive (that is his Mercy), he cannot simply absolve the guilty without reason, for that would be contrary to his Justice.^[24] “He who justifies the wicked is an abomination to the Lord” (Pr 17:15). How can God both forgive and remain just?

Saint Alphonsus Liguori meditates on this tension in the form of a dialogue after original sin, whose substance is this: God does not will to lose man; a Redeemer must come forward to satisfy his justice and ransom man from the eternal death he has deserved. Saint Bernard, contemplating this mystery, sees a debate arising between divine Justice — lost if Adam is not punished — and Mercy — lost if he does not obtain pardon. The Lord settles the dispute by decreeing that an innocent man will die to save guilty man: only the eternal Word offers himself to ransom man by his death, for the infinite majesty offended cannot receive worthy reparation from a mere creature, and his Justice will thus be fully satisfied.^[25]

This text is a theological and spiritual key of the first order. Justice and Mercy are not abstractions fighting each other; they are expressions of God's unique love, strained toward the same goal — the salvation of man — and reconciled by an act of infinite love: the Incarnation of the Son.

The Logic of Satisfaction: Why Christ?

Saint Anselm poses the problem with remarkable rigor. The offense of sin is infinite — not because man would be infinitely evil, but because the offense is proportioned to the dignity of the One offended, who is the infinite God. A finite reparation (that of any creature whatever) cannot suffice to satisfy an infinite offense.^[26]

But the offender is man — so it is man who must make reparation. And no one among men can offer an infinite reparation.

The only way out: that a being who is at once man (so that reparation comes from sinful humanity) and God (so that reparation has infinite value) should take charge of the debt. That is exactly what Christ accomplishes by dying on the Cross.^[27]

In a child's words: Jesus pays in our place, because only God can repair a fault committed against God — and a man was needed to pay in the place of men.

“For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.” — Saint Paul, 2 Corinthians 5:21^[28]

“Sin, contempt for an infinite love, could only be repaired by an infinite love. The Word of God becomes incarnate so that love may triumph in him and through him. On Calvary Jesus purchased at the price of all his blood a double right: the right, for him, to love us despite — or even because of — our sins, our unworthiness; and the right, for us, to love him out of our immense misery and to contemplate his divine attributes, including his justice, in his infinite mercy.” — Father Jean du Cœur de Jésus d'Elbée, Croire à l'Amour, Téqui, 2007, pp. 20–21^[29]

Redemption Reconciles Everything

On the Cross, Justice is fully satisfied: the price of sin is paid, the debt is settled. And it is precisely because justice is satisfied that Mercy can pour itself out without restraint. “For God has not destined us for wrath, but to obtain salvation through our Lord Jesus Christ” (1 Thess 5:9).^[30] “But God shows his love for us in that while we were yet sinners Christ died for us. Since, therefore, we are now justified by his blood, much more shall we be saved by him from the wrath of God” (Rom 5:8–9).^[31]

This reconciliation is not only a historical reality accomplished on Calvary — it continues in every celebration of the sacrament of penance. There, Justice and Mercy meet concretely, for each sinner: Justice is respected (the sin is named, contrition is required, satisfaction is imposed); Mercy exceeds it (forgiveness is total, gratuitous, immediate). Pope Francis, in the bull of indiction of the Jubilee of Mercy, presents mercy as the face the Church must show to the world, and restores Confession to the center as the sacrament where the sinner touches with his hands the greatness of mercy and receives interior peace.^[32]

And the Church expresses this truth in the Exsultet of the Easter Vigil: O happy fault of Adam, which gained for us so great a Redeemer! Divine justice was so perfectly repaired, with so ardent a love, that even the original fault becomes — paradoxically — matter for thanksgiving.

The Exchange: Take Me, and Ransom Yourself

Saint Anselm formulates with striking acuity, in Cur Deus Homo (Book II, ch. XX), the exchange by which the condemned sinner is saved — the Father giving his Son, the Son offering himself:

“What could be more merciful than this: to the sinner condemned to eternal torments, who has nothing with which to ransom himself, God the Father says: take my only Son and give him for yourself; and the Son himself: take me and ransom yourself?” — Saint Anselm of Canterbury, Cur Deus Homo, Book II, ch. XX (French translation of the Latin quoted in the note)^[33]

See the exchange: we take Christ, and we ransom ourselves through him. Justice is satisfied — not by us, but in us and for us.

Scripture on Fatherly Punishment

The biblical tradition is consistent on one point: divine punishment is fatherly, not vindictive. The Epistle to the Hebrews explicitly quotes the Book of Proverbs:

“For the Lord disciplines him whom he loves, and chastises every son whom he receives.” (Heb 12:6; cf. Prov 3:12)^[34]

And the author continues: “It is for discipline that you have to endure: God is treating you as sons [...]. For the moment all discipline seems painful rather than pleasant; later it yields the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it” (Heb 12:7, 11).^[35]

The Catechism teaches that divine Providence can draw good from the consequences of an evil, even a moral one (§312).^[36] There is no suffering that God does not order, at least permissively, toward the good of the soul.

God Wounds in Order to Heal

Jesus explains to Luisa Piccarreta this paradox of the love that wounds in order to heal:

“I wound My children in order to heal them. I destroy them in order to raise them up.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, Volume 2, October 25, 1899^[37]

And he spells out the logic of this divine medicine:

“My Heart overflows with tenderness. But, believe Me, punishments are necessary. And if you do not want Me to strike creatures a little now, later you will see Me strike them much more severely, for they will offend Me still more.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, Volume 2, October 14, 1899^[38]

The Comparison of Mariam Baouardy

Saint Mariam Baouardy, the Little Arab (Palestinian Carmelite, 1846–1878), sums up the whole in an image of overwhelming truth:

“Consider a father who loves his eldest son. The more he corrects him and the more wounds he gives him, the worse he becomes. He must send him to prison to save him.” — Saint Mariam Baouardy, Pensées de la petite Mariam, Éditions du Carmel, 2022^[39]

Prison is not an act of the father's vengeance — it is his last resort of love. He suffers at sending his son there. But letting him go on would lose him definitively.

That is exactly what God does in certain circumstances. Father Thomas, in a letter to Jacques Fesch, expresses with remarkable precision how to live such punishment from within:

“God's justice is inseparable from his Love: if God demands reparation for our sins, He never separates this reparation from the greatest gift He can give us: Himself, his beloved Son, Jesus.” — Father Thomas, quoted in Jacques Fesch — Dans 5 heures je verrai Jésus, Jubilé, 1989, Tuesday August 6, 1957, pp. 105–106^[40]

Just God Because He Cannot Leave Crime Unpunished

Henri-Marie Boudon sums up the classic teaching with a sharpness that may unsettle modern readers:

“Truly, the state of sinner calls for sufferings of itself; for God, who is most just, cannot leave crime unpunished: his justice punishes it, either in this life or in the next.” — Henri-Marie Boudon, Les Saintes voies de la Croix, Book I, ch. IV^[41]

That is precisely why Purgatory is an expression of divine love and not of his vengeance: it completes the purification that life did not accomplish. “But, since beatitude is reserved for the next life for his good servants, their faults must therefore be punished in this world”^[42] — and if they have not been in this world, Purgatory completes them in the next, by a justice that is already in itself a mercy.

Purification as Salvation, Not Vengeance

The Holy Curé of Ars, Saint John Mary Vianney, gives an image of God's fatherly heart that shatters every vengeful misrepresentation:

“There are those who give the Eternal Father a hard heart. Oh! How mistaken they are! The Eternal Father, to disarm his justice, gave his Son a heart excessively good: one does not give what one does not have.” — Saint John Mary Vianney, Pensées, Artège, 2015, pp. 10–11^[43]

The most famous parable on divine mercy — the prodigal son (Lk 15:11–32) — is often misread. We remember the father who runs, embraces, celebrates. We forget the context: the son claimed his share of the inheritance while his father was still alive — a deeply humiliating act in the culture of the time, equivalent to wishing his father dead. He squandered everything with prostitutes. He ate with pigs. Saint John Paul II, in his encyclical Dives in Misericordia, devoted his longest meditation to this parable, showing that it does not abolish the reality of sin but reveals how God answers it: by a love that recreates what was lost.^[44]

The Calculated Return: Justice Would Be Enough

When the son returns, it is at first out of calculation (his inner soliloquy shows it: “How many of my father's hired servants have bread enough and to spare,” Lk 15:17). He returns to earn his living, not to love his father. He even prepares a carefully measured speech: “I am no longer worthy to be called your son; treat me as one of your hired servants.” It is a contract he proposes — just, humbled, but a contract.

Yet strict justice would have granted him exactly that. He squandered his share; let him return as a servant: that would have been reasonable, deserved, just. And it would have sufficed for the cold conscience of an accountant-God.

The Father Who Runs: Mercy Outruns All Merit

But the father runs — before the confession is uttered, before conversion is proven, before penance is accomplished. He runs, he embraces, he celebrates. This sequence overturns the calculation: the father gives not in proportion to recovered merit, but in proportion to the love that never ceased. “For this my son was dead, and is alive again; he was lost, and is found” (Lk 15:32).^[45]

John Paul II stresses that in this parable the son receives more than he asked: he asked for a servant's place, he receives the robe, the ring, and the fatted calf — symbols of restored filial dignity. Mercy is not content to return what was due; it recreates, it raises up, it exceeds.^[46]

Justice would say: he squandered his share; let him return as a servant. That would suffice. Mercy says: he was lost, he is found; he was dead, he lives again — let us feast. Justice is not erased (the son is not restored to his first legal rank); but mercy transcends it by a gift that crushes all calculation.

The Elder Son: The Temptation to Reduce God to an Accountant

The most revealing figure is the elder son, the one who did not leave. Faced with the feast, he is indignant: “Lo, these many years I have served you, and I never disobeyed your command; yet you never gave me a kid, that I might make merry with my friends. But when this son of yours came, who has devoured your living with harlots, you killed for him the fatted calf!” (Lk 15:29–30).

Legally, he is entirely right. His protest is the protest of strict justice against God's generosity. And that is precisely what reveals his inner poverty: he never understood that serving a father means entering into his love, not into his contract. He had the father wholly available (“all that is mine is yours,” v. 31), yet he lived like a hired hand, not like a son.

This figure of the elder son is that of every soul that has reduced God to an accountant and suffers from divine generosity. John Paul II sees in it a serious warning: whoever envies God's mercy toward others reveals that he does not yet truly know the Father's love.^[47]

“Jesus takes our faults upon himself, and we make his merits our own. And the Father receives us as if we were his beloved Son, by an infinite mercy, yet in all justice.” — Father Jean du Cœur de Jésus d'Elbée, Croire à l'Amour, Téqui, 2007, p. 22^[48]

God Seeks Co-Redeemers

One of the most striking aspects of converging private revelations is this call of God to find souls who offer themselves to appease his justice. These are private revelations, not declared supernatural by the Church: they are quoted here as testimonies, not as a teaching of the magisterium. In simple words: a “co-redeemer” is a friend of Jesus who accepts to offer his sufferings with him to help sinners return to God. The vocabulary may surprise — how could a created soul disarm God? But it is a profound spiritual reality that Saint Paul formulates boldly: “I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church” (Col 1:24).^[49]

“I repeat it to you, abandon yourself to my Love. I want you to be the victim of divine Justice and the relief of my Love. I will immolate you, but with arrows of Love.” — Jesus to the Servant of God Josefa Menendez, Un appel à l'Amour, Œuvre du Sacré-Cœur, p. 65^[50]

The Spiritual Logic: Reparative Love, Not Legal Compensation

These texts are not to be read in a logic of accounting transaction — as if a soul's offering arithmetically compensated for sins in a heavenly ledger. They express a reality of communion in Love: the soul that suffers freely out of love for God and for sinners unites itself to Christ's Passion, which is the sole redemptive act. It shares in the suffering mystical body of Christ.

Jesus says it clearly to the Servant of God Luisa Piccarreta:

“My daughter, like Me, you are a victim. Let all your actions shine with the same pure and holy intentions as Mine so that, seeing My own image in you, I may freely flood you with My graces and, thus adorned, I may present you as a fragrant victim to divine Justice.” — Jesus to Luisa Piccarreta, The Book of Heaven, Volume 2, July 4, 1899^[51]

In a child's words: a “victim” is someone who says to Jesus: “I am willing to suffer a little, out of love, for those who refuse to change.” The victim is a soul that says: I consent to suffer what sinners refuse to suffer; I complete, out of love, what Redemption claims in each soul personally. It is not God who needs compensation — it is the victim soul that freely enters the dynamic of co-redemption.

The Co-Redemptive Vocation: Living the Reconciliation of Justice and Mercy

The very existence of this spiritual vocation is revealing of the divine economy. God does not impose suffering from outside: he invites souls to enter freely into the Passion of his Son, to complete what Redemption claims in each soul personally (cf. Col 1:24). In a child's words: Jesus paid everything on the Cross, but he invites us to help him — by offering our little sufferings with his to save souls. It is not that Christ's Redemption is insufficient — it is superabundant. It is that Christ willed to associate man with his saving work, just as the Father willed that the Son himself should suffer to redeem, rather than absolve by decree.

The co-redemptive logic is precisely the place where Justice and Mercy become lived from within by a soul: the victim soul says yes to suffering what sinners refuse to suffer — not out of masochism, but out of love, because it understands that every sin inflicts a wound in the mystical Body of Christ, and that love wants to repair this wound. It thus enters into God's very movement: who is just (takes suffering seriously), and merciful (wills the salvation of all, at the price of all).

Saint Paul sums up this reality with a boldness that has not finished being pondered:

“I complete what is lacking in Christ's afflictions for the sake of his body, that is, the Church.” — Saint Paul, Colossians 1:24^[52]

The vocation of victim souls is therefore the highest testimony that Justice and Mercy do not oppose each other: it is their living synthesis in a consenting soul, which says amen to Christ's Cross to the very end.

Justice Serves Love

All the preceding reflection converges toward this fundamental truth: divine Justice is not an end in itself. It serves one unique end, which the Catechism expresses thus: “God created everything for man [...] but man was created to serve and love God and to offer all creation back to Him.”^[53] Everything — creation, Redemption, Providence, trials, punishments — is ordered to this design of love: that man be happy with God, eternally.

Scripture expresses it with incomparable density: “My delight is to be with the sons of men” (Prov 8:31).^[54] And the Lord himself, through the mouth of Ezekiel, reveals what divine Justice desires at bottom:

“Say to them, As I live, says the Lord God, I have no pleasure in the death of the wicked, but that the wicked turn from his way and live.” — Ezekiel 33:11^[55]

Here is the ultimate truth: all divine Justice, with its anger and its punishments, has but one finality — that man may live. God does not rise up against man; he rises up against what kills man.

It Is Because He Loves Us That He Is Just

If God is just — if divine anger is real, if punishment is possible — it is ultimately because God loves and love cannot accommodate the destruction of the one it loves. Punishing sin means taking the sinner's person seriously: it means saying his acts have weight, his freedom is real, his life deserves not to be treated with indifference.

“God is just because he gives what he had foreseen” — but he has the right to be merciful, to give more than strict justice requires. And this more is the Son of God delivered for us on the Cross.

The Eternal Father tells Mother Eugenia Ravasio (a private revelation, not declared supernatural by the Church) what could be the synthesis of this entire article:

“Ah! How I would like to make Myself known as the almighty Father that I am for you [...] : to love them all, to give them My graces, to forgive their repentance and above all, not to judge them by My justice, but by My Mercy, so that all may be saved and numbered among My elect.” — God the Father to Mother Eugenia Ravasio, Message of Our Father, first notebook, July 1, 1932^[56]

“God Is Love”: The Last Word

Saint John gives the ultimate formula: “God is love” (1 Jn 4:8, 16).^[57] Not: God has love, or God loves sometimes. But: God is Love. Love is his essence, his very being. Justice and Mercy are not two attributes pulling in opposite directions; they are two expressions of one and the same infinite Love.

Justice says: I love you enough to take seriously what you make of your freedom and your life. Mercy says: I love you enough to give you more than you deserve, to save you in spite of yourself. And Redemption says both together: I Myself paid the price of your debt, to be free to love you infinitely.

That is why God's holy anger is good news. That is why his punishments are gestures of love. That is why his Mercy is not complacency but a dizzying gift. And that is why the conclusion of every contemplation of God is always the same, from the beginning:

“For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life.” — John 3:16^[58]

• The answer to evil and suffering — Why does God allow suffering? The Catholic answer to the atheist argument from evil.
• God's Infinite Love in Redemption — Redemption as the supreme proof of divine love.
• God's Love, Evil, and Hell — Why a God of love can allow evil and hell.