The words mercy and justice in Hebrew have gender. Wisdom and mercy are represented by female concepts, whereas justice is often male. We do not know the Nephite language, so we do not know if this was so in their language. However, Alma did indicate that they are opposites: “For behold, justice exerciseth all his demands, and also mercy claimeth all which is her own; and thus, none but the truly penitent are saved” (Alma 42:24). It is interesting that he expected God to be both just and merciful in order to be a perfect God. Perhaps the translation retained the male and female designations to say that, at one level, while justice and mercy are opposites of each other, they are both created in the image of God and they are necessary partners and counterparts to each other. In other words, males and females are both human beings, but are both manifestations of the same divine nature.
Along these lines, Elder James R. Rasband devoted an entire General Conference talk to this subject, how God’s judgment can, does, and must satisfy both the divine virtues of justice and mercy. The entire talk is a very clear and cogent sermon drawing primarily on Alma 42. He commented, in part, as follows:
A vital and peace-giving contribution of the Book of Mormon to our understanding of the Savior’s Atonement is its teaching that Christ’s merciful sacrifice fulfills all the demands of justice. As Alma explained, “God himself atoneth for the sins of the world, to bring about the plan of mercy, to appease the demands of justice, that God might be a perfect, just God, and a merciful God also” [Alma 42:15]. The Father’s plan of mercy—what the scriptures also call the plan of happiness or the plan of salvation—could not be accomplished unless all the demands of justice were satisfied. (Rasband, General Conference, April 2020).
In contrast, traditional theologians have often denied that God can be both just and merciful. They see this as a conflict, a contradiction, and God must be consistent. That problem may have arisen when the early Christian concept of God was defined by such philosophers as Augustine and Plato, who argued that God or the pure form can have no body and is beyond space and time. They argued that as God is eternal and timeless, and to be both merciful and just simultaneously would be philosophically impossible, and thus in their view, God must ultimately be one (mercy, love) or the other (justice, exacting). We do not believe in an abstract God like that. We believe in a God who not only had a body that exists in space, but also manages time, even uses time, and can grant a window of time for the benefit of his people. He can be just through His use of time and space to give a period of mercy.
Alma was not constrained by these philosophical limitations placed on the scriptural doctrine of God by Christian theology. Alma understood the nature of God, and his plan. He had encountered it in his own personal life and experience. Alma thus had both experience and revelation on his side.
Elder Rasband noted Alma’s sorrow as the demands of justice weighed on him: “Remember that as a young man, Alma went about seeking ‘to destroy the church.’ In fact, Alma told his son Helaman that he was ‘tormented with the pains of hell’ because he had effectively ‘murdered many of [God’s] children’ by leading ‘them away unto destruction’ (Alma 36:13–14). Then he noted what caused Alma’s joy and relief:
Alma explained to Helaman that peace finally came to him when his “mind caught hold” on his father’s teaching “concerning the coming of … Jesus Christ … to atone for the sins of the world” (
James R. Rasband, “Ensuring a Righteous Judgment,” General Conference April 2020.