Mankind often ask this question today as they watch as blow upon blow of fateful happenings assail them or their loved ones and those around them. Then there is also the various prophecies about tribulations and disasters which many have predicted will last for many years, if not decades. Then the question is asked that if God was so loving how could He allow this or that to happen and then why for so long? 

In the first place we must realise that God is Perfect and as such does not engage in arbitrary actions. It is actually this very point that needs to be drilled into humanity so that at last we have a little bit of an idea of the Perfection of God. This is actually the obstacle that many of us needs to overcome before we can begin to comprehend what really happens in Creation.

The Perfection of God means inviolable immutability; it means that once He has given His Will as Laws in Creation He does not need to intervene anymore because this Will is perfect. There is nothing that has not been taken into consideration and there is nothing that cannot be dealt with within the compass and ambit of this Will. The laws of nature are the Will of God and we are all aware of how immutable they are. The Sun, for example, will not suddenly one day rise in the West, and if we plant a grain of rice we will not reap anything other than rice.

Now this same obvious observances in nature is to be found in literally everything that happens in life and in Creation and in existence. If God has stipulated a particular way for development and evolution of everything then that is the way that event must continue to unfold and develop and He will not arbitrarily change His Laws to bring about a different outcome. So much so that if we think in a particular way, for example, the consequences of our thinking must be the same as what we initially thought out. So hateful thinking will produce nothing different as a consequence and so on.

Now let us objectively look at mankind, at ourselves and the way we have lived for thousands of years and then ask ourselves what the consequences of our actions will be. Over millennia all we have done is fight wars, hate each other, heap envy on our neighbours and so on. Objectively speaking all we have spent most of our history on are actions which cannot be said to be pleasing to God. This cannot be denied by anyone.

There must come a time when the consequences of all our actions must be returned to us. All our previous actions have been nothing but seed we have sown in Creation which one day we must reap as harvest. It is obvious that the harvest will not be different from the seed. If all we have done is put hatred, envy and fighting, etc into Creation then these are the same consequences we must expect. 

That is why indeed all we can expect is suffering and tribulation! If on the other hand we had sown nothing but love for our neighbours, then there would not have been a question of tribulation at this point in time but the greatest joys and happiness which would have been the harvest.

The fact that it takes many years and even decades for this tribulation to play itself out is simply the fact that there is a huge amount of these our wrong actions, and nothing more. God simply returns the consequences of our collective actions. There is indeed a huge amount of our wrong deeds, and indeed there should be considering that we had spent centuries and thousands of years producing and sowing nothing but evil. 

It simply takes a long time for all the effects to work themselves out as consequences! If there was not such a huge load of our wrong actions and volitions then the duration of the consequences would have been shorter. But alas this is not the case! So it is not as if God allows anything as such and that He acts arbitrarily to prolong our sufferings. There is nothing of the sort!

The duration of our suffering is simply a consequence of our own doing. It will take years and probably decades for all the evil volition of mankind to be finally destroyed. So we should stop asking this question. What we should be asking is how come we have produced so much evil that it takes this long to clear up!?

Let us make the effort to ascertain that we do not keep adding to the burden of sin we all carry on our shoulders by keeping our thoughts, words and actions pure, then the duration of the tribulation for us as individuals might perhaps be a little lessened.