Exodus 34:7
Exodus 34:77maintaining loving devotion to a thousand generations, forgiving iniquity, transgression, and sin. Yet He will by no means leave the guilty unpunished; He will visit the iniquity of the fathers on their children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generations.”
— "but he will by no means leave the guilty unpunished" — is present in JW theology but typically absorbed into a general sense of Jehovah's justice at Armageddon: the wicked will be destroyed, the faithful survive. The specific problem the verse raises — how "by no means leave the guilty unpunished" and "forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin" in verse 6 can coexist in one God — is usually not the focus.
Verse 7 is the half of Jehovah's self-description that makes the cross necessary. "Merciful" (v.6) and "by no means clearing the guilty" (v.7) cannot both be true unless someone pays the penalty for the guilty in the guilty person's place. A judge who simply waives the fine is not merciful — he is corrupt. Mercy without justice is moral bankruptcy; justice without mercy is cold law. The cross is the only event in history where both halves of are simultaneously true. At the cross, Jesus — fully God, fully man — bears the penalty the guilty owe, satisfying "by no means clearing the guilty," while making forgiveness available for "transgression and sin." explicitly ties the atonement to this tension: God put Christ forward as a propitiation "so that he might be just and the justifier." is the problem; the cross is the solution. The Watchtower's half-applied ransom (Adam's sin paid, personal sin conditional on compliance) keeps the tension open; the biblical gospel closes it fully at Calvary.