Many things in the world we look at and say "why does God allow that to go on?" Why no divine thunderbolts?
As we grow as Christians, we look more at the church, as we learn that judgment must begin at the house of God (1 Peter 4:17), and that teachers will receive a stricter judgment (James 3:1). It is the church which is called to be the light of the world (Matthew 5:14) - a light to shine before men, and point the way to them. If the world is in a mess then, well, of course it is. It is in darkness. But when the lamp that should be shining out light also has darkness in it, then this is much more tragic. Why does God allow it? Why no divine thunderbolts?
The letters of Revelation 2-3 tell us that Christ does walk amidst the churches, and does judge them. It is a fearsome judgment. The lampstand may be taken away. One question we are left to wrestle with is: how do we know when that has happened? If the church of Ephesus in Revelation 2 had had its lampstand removed, what would be the signs of this? It was orthodox, fought against wrong beliefs, and laboured with patience, and could not tolerate evil. When its lampstand was removed, would it still be, on the outside, apparently orthodox and hard-working, but just with no real spiritual fruit and operations of the Holy Spirit? Or does Christ's withdrawal of his presence mean a withholding of the grace that would stop it sliding into error and into apathy about the human need around it, so that error and evil would be seen? Presumably his withdrawal would in some manner become more and more obvious, requiring less and less discernment to see it, over time.
One thing that Scripture does teach us is that God's patience is different, far greater, than ours. It is not infinite, but he is very generous in giving people time to repent (Romans 2:1-4, 2 Peter 3:-9). This creates its own danger for those who aren't listening to him, because they (as suggested by Paul in Romans 2) take the lack of divine thunderbolts as confirmation that they're doing just fine, and have no need to change course.
As an example of this in the Bible: the Jerusalem temple and nation were not destroyed by God's judgment until 40 years after Christ was crucified. That gave a whole generation time to reflect, to consider, to see the clear evidence of God's Spirit and fulfilled prophecy in the Christian church, to recognise that Jesus of Nazareth was the Christ raised from the dead, and to receive his offer of forgiveness and life. Or, it gave 40 years to convince oneself that the pesky Nazarene trouble-maker had been happily got rid of, and wasn't going to be seen again - and if only now we could squelch out his mad followers, we can then go back to business as usual.
It seems to me that the time of God's patience gives time to reveal the righteousness and wisdom of his justice. When given a long time to reconsider and repent, people lose the excuse of saying "I didn't have time to reflect; nobody warned me; more years would have allowed me to grow wiser, think, and change; it was a simple mistake, an oversight of the sort any mortal makes, that I'd have happily have rectified". In God's grace, with the passing of time, with prayer, with the Holy Spirit, God's people do reflect and repent. But where people don't want to, they're instead giving a full and complete demonstration that they did nothing except what was in their hearts, what they wanted to do. And when God eventually says "enough", nobody can doubt that it was so. The seasons come, the seasons go; warnings are spoken, warnings are ignored, but there's no change - and why not? Because the problem was not something technical, something complicated, something subtle: the problem all along was sin which continually demanded judgment.
There are, then, comparatively few divine thunderbolts in this life because of God's glorious mercy, and because of God's righteous judgment. When you see sin that continues, the situation will not continue indefinitely; it's heading towards one of those two.
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