People tend to over look that God can not tolerate sin, And he is vengeful and full of wrath, God is not some peace loving hippy on the verge of pop culture with what we find socially acceptable,, when Jesus returns, He will come to bring a sword. We have Gods mercy, If we accept it, But those who do not, Will be destroyed The Heavenly Father can not stand our sin and corruption he has destroyed cities before and people.. We are lucky that we have his mercy.. because people seem to have a problem accepting that he is GOD AND CAN DO WHATEVER HE PLEASES.. it is wise to Fear God and his wrath.
This kind of talk is what drives people
away from Christ.
It is true that God is Almighty, it is true that God can, and will punish the wicked. However... God so Loved the world that He gave His only begotten Son to save it, so that no one would perish but all would come to repentance.
See, God doesn't care what you've done, if you're willing to repent. You could have raped 500 women and killed 500 babies and blasphemed Him 500 times and the moment you drop to your knees in front of Him and wholeheartedly and sincerely repent for your evil deeds,
you will be forgiven.
God isn't looking for excuses to destroy us. If He were, He would have made the Earth explode a long time ago with the snap of His Holy Fingers. I rather like to think that God is looking for the opposites -- "excuses" to save us. He gives us every opportunity to repent and turn back to Him, and He will accept us
at any time, as long as certain rules are followed, like... it has to be before your physical death, it has to be sincere and whole-hearted (He knows, trust me, He knows if you're being sincere), etc.
As for Dathan, and the like: God had to make a statement. He knew those children were not past the Age of Innocence yet, and He knew they would end up in Paradise, and later, Heaven if they were to die then. He also knew that if they didn't die, they likely might have been pariahs, or perhaps Israel might not have learned her lesson on those days. God knew that if He
utterly destroyed everything that pertained to Dathan, that it would be a shocking wake-up call to the rest of Israel. He's got all kinds of mercy, longsuffering, etc... but there are certain things He will
NOT tolerate by any means, and one of them is grossly breaking His Ten Commandments, not even two months after they were given, after they promised Him that they would do them.
Look at this from God's POV. You wrote with
your own finger in stone 10 commandments. They stood before you and said "As You said, we will do." Then, you ask Moses to come up to the Mountain for 40 days for further instructions... and within those 40 days, they manage to break every single one of your 10 commandments just because they lacked faith that Moses would come back to them. This is after you made every attempt to show Israel your might. You used pillars of fire, clouds of shade, you made water flow out of rocks, you dropped bread from Heaven, you parted the Red Sea, you plagued Egypt and they lose faith in less than 40 days and entirely 180 turn away from you and do entirely detestable acts.
What would
you do? Would you not be angry? Would you not want to wipe Dathan and his entire family off the planet to tell the rest of Israel that you will NOT tolerate such things happening in your holy nation?
The kids involved in that died, and normally that's a horrible thing... but yet kids get a free pass to Heaven because they were still innocent when they died. Whenever a person murders an innocent child, it's a truly heinous act, because God might have had plans for that child. However, when God causes a child's death... I see it as an act of mercy -- you know the child will go to Heaven and usually when that happens, I believe it happens for one of two reasons:
1). The child might have been lost otherwise,
2). It was a lesson to someone else.
In Jewish culture, genealogies are everything. The end of your family line was HUGE in ancient Jewish Culture (so big, Levirite Marriage was a thing -- if a married man died without offspring, the man's brother had an obligation to impregnate the widow to carry on the family line). If kids of Dathan had survived that catastrophy, Dathan's family line would have continued and God seemed to not want that. By destroying ALL of Dathan's house, God made a statement that He would entirely wipe them off the face of the planet if they did similar as to what Dathan did.