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I think it is hard to understand how God can be both a loving God, and yet a God who deals out justice where it's due. The best I can understand it, God's main theme is love. I say this because I believe what Jesus said about the greatest 2 commandments in the whole of the Bible, which are to love God and love others.
When some of the religious scholars gathered their forces for an assault. One of them spoke, posing a question they hoped would show him up: "Teacher, which command in Torah is the most important?"
Jesus said, "'Love God with all your passion and prayer and intelligence.' This is the most important, the first on any list. But there is a second to set alongside it: 'Love others as well as you love yourself.' These two commands are pegs; everything in Scripture -- the Law and the Prophets -- hangs from them."
I believe that God is concerned primarily with forgiveness and mercy. He'd much rather welcome you back with open arms than send judgement your way and leave you to yourself. At the same time, if God didn't deal out justice in some way, at some point in time -- whether on earth, after death, or at the end of time -- he wouldn't be a just God. Think about it: without justice, we have a lawless system where good actions are never rewarded, and evil actions are never punished; there has to be law enforcement somewhere, spiritually speaking. That may be completely natural too, no supernatural intervention required , for instance, if you induldge yourself in certain wrongs, there are some wrongs that you'll soon ruin your life in. Paul mentioned this in his letter to Rome:
You know well enough from your own experience that there are some acts of so-called freedom that destroy freedom. Offer yourselves to sin, for instance, and it's your last free act. But offer yourselves to the ways of God and the freedom never quits. All your lives you've let sin tell you what to do. But thank God you've started listening to a new master, one whose commands set you free to live openly in his freedom!
I'm using this freedom language because it's easy to picture. You can readily recall, can't you, how at one time the more you did just what you felt like doing—not caring about others, not caring about God—the worse your life became and the less freedom you had? And how much different is it now as you live in God's freedom, your lives healed and expansive in holiness?
As long as you did what you felt like doing, ignoring God, you didn't have to bother with right thinking or right living, or right anything for that matter. But do you call that a free life? What did you get out of it? Nothing you're proud of now. Where did it get you? A dead end.
But now that you've found you don't have to listen to sin tell you what to do, and have discovered the delight of listening to God telling you, what a surprise! A whole, healed, put-together life right now, with more and more of life on the way! Work hard for sin your whole life and your pension is death. But God's gift is real life, eternal life, delivered by Jesus, our Master.
The key, then, is love and forgiveness from God for as long as that person has even an inkling of openness to it. Perhaps even longer, I don't know. But there is a cut-off point, a point when there will be justice for those people: good to those that did good, evil to those that did evil. It's the ultimate conclusion of reaping what you've sowed. Whether you've spread the seed of love your whole life by forgiving people and helping people out, or if you've sown evil by mocking and scoffing and living only for yourself, you'll eventually get what's coming to you.
An analogy of the love of God
When you're a child, it's difficult to understand discipline and punishment. You know when you've done something you're going to be disciplined, that's it. All you see is action and consequence. But when you've matured into an adult, you begin to see it is more than action and consequence, you soon realize there's far more to discipline. There's an underlying motive, which is love, that is to put your child back on the right path, make him repentant for what he's done so that he won't do it again and again, ruining his life with rebellion and disobedience. You, as a parent, aren't doing it out of anger or hatred or spiteful vengence, but out of real love for your child, in the expectation of your child becoming an orderly, right-living human being.
In the same sense, God's discipline of his children, whether a natural outcome of sin or supernatural God-stepping-in, is done not out of pure anger, but out of the underlying motive of love. God loves us so much, he'd rather take the time to discipline us and set us straight with him, than leave us to ruining our lives by our rebellion and the evil things every one of us has done. He'd rather issue a, "Welcome back my son! Let's celebrate!" exclamation than a condemning, "I'm done with you, I'll leave you alone while you ruin your life with that."
I know I'll get voted down for this. It's ok. People don't like hearing that there are consequences for every action, a harvest of all the planted fruit, good or bad; a reaping of what we've sown. Seems to me that is a good indicator of the things the world has sown.