Justice? You call that fair treatment of individuals!
I won't believe that, God is better than that. God is better than punishing innocents little ones because others have done wrong.
If Justice is not tempered by love or discernment it becomes no more than revenge.
Killing people without distinguishing to whether they are truly guilty or innocent is not an act of Justice, it is an act of murder and malice.
None of us are innocent. We are all born depraved, enslaved to our sin nature and worthy of death.
Furthermore, the people were guilty, and were adjudicated as guilty. God
It doesn't matter what you as a Human Being think is fair or not. When God commanded the israelites to destroy a people that sinned against him, he did so to protect his people and his society. Those people that sinned against him were to be utterly destroyed because their very presence was like a cancer.
God's absolute holiness and justice required that the cancer be removed.
When God destroyed the Canaanites, He did it to preserve his truth among the Israelites. When cancer exists, the only wise thing to do is to cut it out. And God does that in a preserving act for his people.
Remember that in every case where God ever did punish a wicked people, He always offered to those people salvation. In Malachi, He says, Im going to come in and wipe out the land. But He says, For those of you who believe in me, you will be mine in the day that I make up my jewels, and I will have a book of remembrance and Ill write your name in it.
Before He wiped out Sodom and Gomorrah, what did He do? He preached the truth there. God always gives an opportunity to the righteous or those who are willing to be believers in him before there is ever a judgment. He was willing to spare the city for 10 righteous and moral people, not even that could be found. Many people forget how rampant the wickedness and immorality of these people was.
God is tremendously patient. Tremendously tolerant. Just look at Genesis 15:
Gen 15:13 And He said to Abram, You must surely know that your seed shall be a stranger in a land not theirs, and shall serve them. And they shall afflict them four hundred years.
Gen 15:14 And also I will judge that nation whom they shall serve. And afterward they shall come out with great substance.
Gen 15:15 And you shall go to your fathers in peace. You shall be buried in a good old age.
Gen 15:16 But in the fourth generation they shall come here again, for the iniquity of the Amorites is not yet full.
God said, The Amorites will be here 400 years. Well, thats a long time! Four hundred years! Why so long?
God said, I won't yet destroy the Amorites because their iniquity has not yet run its limits out, where judgment is the only answer. In other words, God gave the Amorites 400 years in which to get things straightened out, and it wasnt until that period of time that God would let the Israelites move in. God, in his grace toward the Amorites, kept the Israelites 400 years in slavery just to give the Amorites the same 400 years.
In that period of time, they consummated and filled up their sin so that it was time for God to move in and judge before they infected society and the world to a great degree.
As a result of the fall, all of us deserve death, God in his Grace and Mercy, elected some to be saved before time began. These people he regenerates and saves, through his will and sovereign mercy.
When you say that isn't fair Remember:
Rom 9:20 No, but, O man, who are you who replies against God? Shall the thing formed say to Him who formed it, Why have you made me this way?
Rom 9:21 Does not the potter have power over the clay, from the same lump to make one vessel to honor and another to dishonor?
Rom 9:22 What if God, willing to show His wrath and to make His power known, endured with much long-suffering the vessels of wrath fitted to destruction;
Rom 9:23 and that He might make known the riches of His glory on the vessels of mercy which He had before prepared to glory;