Question:
Answer:
Your question presumes that God necessarily won’t punish or curtail the commission of further evil. In salvation history, God shows that he will curtail further evil, including in sending the plagues that liberated Israel from the oppression of Egypt, particularly the final one in which the firstborn Egyptian families died, including infant children. Such oppression is one of “the sins that cry to heaven” (CCC 1867)
Similarly, the sins of Sodom and Gomorrah cried to heaven, and so God rained down fire and brimstone on these cities (CCC 1867).
And yet, evil happens every day in the world, including sometimes in history terrible acts of genocide, like the Holocaust. Why does God permit such grave evil? First, God permits such evil, vs. formally causing it (which is contrary to his nature), because he gave mankind free will, and that means allowing men and women to freely choose him or not. That includes permitting the evil that led up to the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah, and the evil the Egyptians committed against the Israelites for many years in leading up to the Exodus.
Second, God permits evil so that he might bring about a greater good. The example par excellence is the suffering and death of his Son, which brought about the redemption of the world and the possibility for eternal life in heaven (CCC 412)
Finally, the death of these Egyptian firstborn does not necessarily portend their eternal destiny. (Because of original sin, those firstborn were destined to die. It just came earlier than Pharaoh and they probably originally anticipated.) Ditto with the citizens of Sodom and Gomorrah and others. We know that God mercifully judges each person in a perfect way that only he can, and we are heartened by Scripture that God sent his only divine Son because he loves and wants to save us all (John 3:16-17; 1 Timothy 2:4; 2 Peter 3:9).