If there's an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God who is Lord of this universe, that presence isn't very evident on the evening news.
It's fair and reflective to wonder: Where is the resurrection in all of this? Why is God seemingly so inactive? Where is the vindication of Easter Sunday?
God, as revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus, doesn't meet our expectations even as he infinitely exceeds them. What the resurrection teaches is that God doesn't forcibly intervene to stop pain and death. Instead he redeems the pain and vindicates the death.
Good and truth will always triumph, but this triumph must be waited for, not because God wants us to endure pain as some kind of test, but because God, unlike ourselves, doesn't use coercion or violence to achieve an aim. God uses only love, truth, beauty, and goodness and God uses these by, structurally and non-negotiably, embedding them into the universe itself, like a giant moral immune-system that eventually, always, brings the body back to health.
God doesn't need to intervene like a super-hero at the end of a Hollywood movie and use a morally- superior violence to kill the bad people so that the good are spared pain and death. God lets the universe right itself the way a body does when it is attacked by a virus. The immune-system eventually does its work, even if, in the short term, there are pain and death. But always, in the end, the universe rights itself.
Simply put: Whenever we do anything wrong, anything at all, it won't turn out right. It can't. The structure of the universe won't receive it and it comes back to us, one way or the other. Conversely, whenever we do something right, anything that's true, good, loving, or beautiful, the universe vindicates that. It judges our every act and its judgement allows no exceptions.
Perhaps that judgement doesn't seem to be immediate, it can seem a long time in coming and thus, for a time, we can be confused and ask the question: "Why doesn't God, truth and goodness, come down off the cross?" But, eventually, without a single exception, evil is shamed and good triumphs. The resurrection works.
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