How can God worry about small miracles, about particular signs and not about the great tragedies of humanity like the thousands of children and poor people who die of hunger in Africa?
There are two points that are touched with this question: If God is good, why does he allow evil? If God allows evil why does he act at certain and particular times?
If God is good, why does he allow evil?
There are many answers to this question, a question that is certainly well posed, since evil is allowed by God, but not created or caused by Him.
The first reason is that God created free beings that can impact reality with their actions. I am free to love or to kill, to create or to destroy.
The second reason: What is good? What is being good ?. Let us raise the hypothetical case that would satisfy the objection to the "good" god who acts as we wish.
God drops bread from heaven throughout Africa breaking all the natural rules that he created. Well, for maybe 3 hours we have this poor and weak children enjoying a good meal, until … armed guerrillas arrive from different points, monopolizing the bread and exchanging food for gold, slavery, sexual favors or other services. Let's see now what god does in his "goodness". It occurs to him to drop the most advanced weapons from the sky so that children and the poor can defend themselves against the guerrillas. What happens in the following weeks is that the African population decreases by 35%, but in addition, external interests begin to be involved: Germany, the USA and the arms-producing powers join the conflict, giving even more weapons to the guerrillas (How can it be that these children and the poor have obtained free weapons?) This makes the guerrillas stronger and manages to eliminate a large part of the weak and poor in Africa. But then the "good" god made of human clay decides to make the skin of his "poor", indestructible to bullets and all kinds of weapons. In the space of a month, the weak and poor completely devastate all the men in the guerrillas, they get all the food, gold, and riches of Africa. Seeing their power, they decide that it is not enough, and they begin to invade Arabia by land and Spain by sea … The "good" human god does not know what to do anymore so he chooses the most coherent thing what he should have done from the beginning, erase completely everything that exists … and it does it, offsetting in 1% the 4 forces that operate the universe... collapsing the cosmos in a total vacuum: then nothing.
No matter which way the human wants his "good" god to follow, it will trigger a cataclysm that should make us disappear from the face of the earth. Because the problem is not God, it is not nature, the problem is us.
How can God "change" us without make us losing the freedom that give us our "being"? Or in plain terms, how can God solve the problem that we are ourselves without destroying us on the one hand and without changing what we are essentially -free- on the other?
That is the history of salvation. But you will hear me talk about that on another occasion.
What is good, the good that makes us happy and full? Maybe we should rethink the answer. The good can not be relative for a being that participates in an absolute, the good can not be finite for a being that participates in the infinite and the good can not be particular for a being that was made only for love.
Giving food to the hungry and water to the thirsty is something relative, particular and finite, giving health to the sick is something relative, particular and finite … giving a universe without pain is something relative, particular and finite. None of this solves the problem, none of this lasts, none of this will really give us the happiness, the deep joy of which we are hungry and thirsty for death. *
The only thing that can fill us is something absolute, infinite and that is completely and totally only for us, and with us. ** You made us for you and our heart will be restless until it rests in you.
Everything else is placebos, your pornography, your nights of drinking, your pseudo-intellectualism, your PS4, your BMW, your ego, your home, your books, your fame, your complacency, your security, your moral, your ethics, your lovers, you.
All that is relative, finite and particular and is destined to become an addiction, that the more you consume the more hunger and thirst it will give you.
That the children of Africa die of hunger is a relative, finite and particular evil, millions die every day, cancer, accidents … Are you sure that in Africa they are more unhappy than in Hollywood? that you? Are you sure that the person with cancer is more unhappy than who abandoned their children? Who has sex with different people every day? Who is in the vegas distributing drugs and killing millions of lives, destroying thousands of families?
Sentimentality has made us mentally weak to understand reality. Yes, evil hurts, and precisely that we have that ability to see the unfair, suffering and evil (which go beyond a biological empathy) puts us face to face to something we seek and do not find in ourselves, facing something that we want with all our strength to achieve and we can not achieve by ourselves.
God's response in Christ is so forceful, so absolute, so unexpected, that only those who do not want to listen, see and understand, rebel against it. Sometimes with good intentions, but most of the time in a childish way.
If God allows evil why does it act at certain particular times?
The only good is God himself, so neither sickness, nor hunger, nor imprisonment, nor persecution are contrary to our good when they are directed towards God himself. In the same way that bread, money, pleasure, family, satiety are evils when they are not directed towards God.
It is significant that Saint John - the greatest biblical theologian - speaks of Jesus' miracles not as miracles but as "signs". God healed the sick, the lame, gave sight to the blind … all relative, particular and finite goods, but which announced the arrival of God himself incarnate, restoring humanity, welcoming the remote, the marginalized … They were signs of God's presence on earth. The lame could have lost the other leg while, celebrating after his recent healing, he started dancing on the roof of his house and slipped, the blind man could have developed blindness as an old man, and the healed, well at the end of many years of health, died. But salvation had come to their lives, from each one, everything was oriented towards God again.
God makes signs to take us to Him. Sometimes they seem to be miraculous, sometimes is an insignificant person for the world, achieving great things for God, sometimes it is something particular that only someone in particular understands. They are weak signs that speak only to us. It is not something quantifiable, absolute and incontestable.
Evil is something real and a God with guts is required to get rid of that evil … a God who bets to call us, invite us, join us, transform us, so that we stop being the problem, to solve it in depth, from the depths of what we are … so that we can see that God became man so that man could become god. God does not want to give us finite goods, he wants to share with us his very divine life.
He wants us to overcome the death, the distance and the abyss that we opened between him and us, between his truth and the lost will of a man who chose himself as his god and only found solitude, darkness and death.
-CJBS
*Giving food to the hungry, and drinking to the thirsty, creating even a world without pain is relative, finite and particular if God is not present in those actions. It does not mean that striving to create a world where there is no hunger, thirst and less pain is not good, it is something that as men in the image of God we should seek, but with the understanding that those finite goods without God are not the true Good.
** The love of God is "so" absolute and infinite that he absolutely and uniquely loves you without detracting from the love for "another" that is not you.