Franics Collins

[Cecelia]

Unless you are simply wrong. From a single reading? Really?

Do you not recall that God gave David three choices:

• three years of famine
  
• three months of fleeing his enemies
  
• three days of plague.
  

David reasoned that the latter would be the best option because he trust more in the mercy of God than in the mercy of men (his enemies).

Why did this happen? Two possibilities come to mind:

1. God was punishing the entire nation for offences that had been building up over time, or
   
2. God sought to teach His people (note that carefully, the Israelites were HIS people) an important lesson concerning strict obedience to His instructions.
   

It's understandable that you have emotional difficulties with this, but if God's judgment is perfect based upon His omniscience, then His justice is also perfect. Nothing that He did was unfair or unjust.

In this account, the multitude was killed for the sin of one man; later, one man would be killed for the sins of the multitude on a cross.

So it's perfectly okay according to you that God killed 70,000 people for a census?  What makes that justice?  The fact that he's god?  Sorry, but it doesn't work that way.  Him being God would not absolve him of anything.  If God killed 70,000 people for a census, then I would say you cannot say that his justice is perfect.

Did you read Lord of the Rings several times, and discover that Sauron was actually the good guy all along?

To be perfectly honest if anyone managed to convince me that the Christian God Existed, I'd more likely worship Satan instead. He sounds far more reasonable.