When a child is missing, why doesn't God communicate as clearly now as He did in the Bible?
EDIT: I've been made aware that my post can be misused by the QAnon conspiracy. I want to make clear that the accusations of QAnon is what the Bible describes as bearing false witness and is a dangerous distraction and evil political twisting of the plight of children.
In the US and EU, around 700000 children are reported as missing each year. There aren't reliable figures for many parts of the world, but if we simply scale up that number for the world's population, then that would make around 10 million missing children, but even this extrapolated figure is based on a number that excludes those that go unreported. What happens to those children is all too often horrifying. They may be beaten, abused, raped, trafficked or killed.
The question has been asked many times why God doesn't prevent such evil singlehandedly, but that's not what I want to focus on in this post. What I want to look at is the nature of God's communication in situations like these. Avoiding such tragedies is usually a matter of acting quickly to get to the address where a child is being held captive.
Rapidly identifying the address can quite literally be a matter of life and death, yet as Christians we are faced with the sad reality that our omniscient God if He ever communicates clearly the necessary information which is doubtful, does so vanishingly rarely even though in the Bible He is depicted as talking directly and unambiguously on multiple occasions. Over 2000 times in the Old Testament there are phrases such as, "And God spoke to Moses" or "the word of the Lord came to Jonah" or "God said." Occasionally God even writes like the words on the wall that Daniel could read or the Ten Commandments.
A particularly relevant example is in Jeremiah 1:9 "..the Lord put out his hand and touched my mouth; and the Lord said to me, 'Now I have put my words in your mouth.'" Imagine if a family member, friend or police officer had the address of a missing child put into his or her mouth what needless tragedy could be avoided.
Sometimes God spoke directly to individuals, a good example being the story of Saul's conversion. Not only does Saul hear from God, but more interestingly Ananias: "The Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.” He answered, “Here I am, Lord.” 11 The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight, and at the house of Judas look for a man of Tarsus named Saul."
If God could quite literally give Ananias an exact address, why not do the same for someone seeking an abducted child facing a deeply traumatic and possibly brief future? How do we make sense of this as Christians?
A common approach to this is to consider the faith of those abducted or those searching for them. However, given the sheer number of cases, it's inconceivable that among those, there are not some incredibly faithful people, praying and fasting regularly and at length - and yet they do not receive an address.
Another response to the lack of a helpful communication from God is that "God's ways are greater than our ways" or words to that effect. Even if it is not expressed, there is an unspoken implication that somehow the unfolding tragedy serves a greater purpose and/or glorifies God. However we run the risk of calling evil good: "A theologian of glory calls evil good and good evil. A theologian of the cross calls the things what it is." (Martin Luther) While it is true that we do not have the complete picture, it is hard to see how the mystery card can be played without implying a theology of glory.
Given the unsatisfactory explanations thus far, we are left looking for alternatives and those that are left are contentious as they suggest that God is unable to communicate lucidly in these situations.
One idea is that God is limited by the forces of Satan fighting Him. A Biblical example comes from Daniel where an angel is delayed in reaching him. "12 He said to me, ‘Do not fear, Daniel, for from the first day that you set your mind to gain understanding and to humble yourself before your God, your words have been heard, and I have come because of your words. 13 But the prince of the kingdom of Persia opposed me for twenty-one days. So Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me, and I left him there with the prince of the kingdom of Persia" (Daniel 10:12-13)
Spiritual warfare can be helpful in understanding God's apparent physical inaction, but is harder to see how Satan might obstruct God from passing an address directly to an individual.
Another approach to this thorny issue is that God simply cannot communicate directly with us. God desires us to have free will and to start down the path of telling us things clearly would lead to control and the absence of free will. The problem here is that this requires assuming that any Bible passage in which God seems to communicate efficiently is not a recording of an event but exaggerated, allegorical etc. and there are a lot of them including pivotal ones like Saul's conversion.
I am thankful to Mark Karris for the question to which this post gives possible solutions. I'd hoped that in the course of writing this post I'd be inspired to come up with a winning answer, but unfortunately I don't have one. I lean toward some combination of the last two ideas simply because the first couple paint God as unloving and indifferent.
I would be glad to hear more ideas that solve the problem of God's apparent unwillingness or inability to communicate clearly the locations of abducted children (or better explanations of how ones I've presented here make sense).
