Why doesn't God punish more sins in this world? (Coleridge's Questions)
The eternal question: Why do the wicked prosper? And hy did God punish the sins of Saul, David, Samson and others, but not intervene when the same sins are committed today—perhaps with greater malice?
It is God's way to set His mark on a certain kind of sin by a great punishment which is a warning as well as a punishment, and then to leave men, if they will, to heap up for themselves worse punishments in the next world if they defy His warning.
Why doesn't God punish more sins in this world?
It must also be remembered that it is the method of God in His providence to punish signally one or two instances of a crime or a sin, and then often to leave other instances unpunished, at least in this world.
We can hardly doubt that the wickedness of the world before the Deluge, or again the peculiarly abominable profligacy of the Cities of the Plain, have been frequently paralleled and equalled at other times and in other cases; that the nations which were exterminated in Palestine by means of the Israelites were not more detestably wicked than others have been since their time.
Scripture is full of cases of sins which have been repeated over and over again without the same temporal chastisements falling on them as those recorded in the sacred annals, such as the sin of Onan, or Core, Dathan, and Abiram, and many of the transgressions of the Israelites which were at once and signally punished by God.
It is God's way to set His mark on a certain kind of sin by a great punishment which is a warning as well as a punishment, and then to leave men, if they will, to heap up for themselves worse punishments in the next world if they defy His warning.
Some sins are indeed punished in this life
It is not always so, because there are certain sins, notably sins that fall under the head of blasphemy against the Holy Ghost, the persecution of the Church, and other sins which are, as it were, insults to God in the government of the world, which He is in a manner bound to visit at once, and of them it is truly said, in our Lord's words, that they are not without punishment both in this world and the next.
But in other cases, after one or two signal instances of punishment, men are allowed without special interference on the part of God to go on in their sin and at last die in it.
For, except for some such reason as exists in the cases mentioned above, when it is necessary for the defence of the positive institutions which God has set up that the punishment of offenders should be visible to all the world, it is not in keeping with the method by which the providence of God deals with mankind that instant and open punishment should fall upon every sin here and now, even upon those of the very kind upon which, in particular instances, such visible punishment has descended.
God’s punishment similar to the judgment of conscience
The judgments of God in this respect may be compared to the reproaches of conscience, which are keen, loud, and terrible the first time that a deliberate sin of any kind is committed, but which, when they are not heeded, speak less loudly and less threateningly, until at last their voice is hardly perceived amid the clamour of passion.
And then, when the end comes, and the time for attending to them is gone by, they wake up in more than their first power, and become the judicial punishment of the soul which has deserved by its own perversity to have its ears for a time dulled to their warnings.
From
The Ministry of St. John the Baptist
Fr Henry James Coleridge, 1886, Ch. XVIII, pp 237-8
In the context of The Cleansing of the Temple,
St. John ii. 13-22; Story of the Gospels, § 23
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