God’s purpose in creating the universe was to end up with a heaven populated by angels - people - from the human race. All His laws, which collectively may be called the Divine Providence, are dedicated to that end. One of those laws is that people must be in freedom to choose to follow those laws or not, because only those things chosen in freedom from a love for them is lasting. This means that people may choose to do evil without obvious, external restraint from the Lord. No hand will come down out of the sky, and no terrible voice will call, “stop!”. The Lord can only work internally in each person using what the person has in his or her understanding or conscience. His overarching law that requires human freedom prevents anything else.

The evils that occur in such circumstances are called permissions. They can serve a purpose. In someone who has a conscience, and wants to do what is right, the doing of some evil or even the thought of doing some evil will bring to the person's attention that a love for that evil exists in them, and a resistance to both the thought and deed must be developed so that shunning the evil can become less difficult. When a person who doesn’t have a conscience does evil, and that evil breaks out into external acts, then others can see that open evil. If dismayed by it, they can see that they should avoid it, or if they see an incipient love for it in themselves, they can work to shun any thought of dwelling on it in their imagination, or, worse, doing it themselves. In this way the Lord can make use of evils that arise in hell. In the work entitled "Divine Providence" we are taught that the Lord never allows evils that cannot serve a useful warning purpose that may lead toward salvation.

(References: Apocalypse Revealed 686; Arcana Coelestia 1299, 2447 [2], 6489, 6574 [2-3], 8227 [2]; Divine Providence 16, 234, 251 [1-2])

8227. 'And the Egyptians were fleeing to meet it' means that they plunged themselves into the falsities arising from evil. This is clear from the meaning of 'fleeing to meet the sea' as plunging themselves into falsities arising from evil, which are meant by the waters of that sea, 8226. The situation is that a person who is ignorant of causes lying on more internal levels inevitably believes that the bad things which happen to the evil, such as their undergoing punishment, vastation, and damnation, and finally being cast into hell, are attributable to the Divine. That is exactly how it seems to him, since such things occur at the presence of the Divine, 8137, 8138, 8188. Even so, no such thing happening to them is attributable to the Divine, only to themselves. The Divine and His presence have one end alone in view, namely the protection and salvation of the good. When the Divine is present with them, protecting them from those who are evil, the evil feel all the more antagonistic towards them, and all the more antagonistic towards the Divine Himself; for they hate Him most of all. Those who hate good hate most of all the Divine. So they rush to the attack, and in the measure that they do so they subject themselves, in keeping with the law of order, to punishment, vastation, and damnation, and at length cast themselves into hell. From all this it becomes clear that the Divine, that is, the Lord, does only what is good and does nothing bad to anyone; rather, those ruled by evil subject themselves to such miseries. This is what is meant when it says that the Egyptians fled to meet the sea; that is, they plunged themselves into the falsities arising from evil.

[2] On this subject something further must be said. The belief also exists that bad things are attributable to the Divine because He allows them and does not take them away. And one who allows something and does not take it away when he has the power to do so appears to will it and so to be the cause of it. But the Divine allows it because He cannot prevent it or take it away. The Divine wills only what is good; if therefore He were to prevent or remove bad things, that is to say, the miseries of punishment, vastation, persecution, temptation, and the like, He would be willing something bad. For then the people who must suffer them could not have their faults corrected and evil would increase until it held sway over good. The situation is like that with a king who acquits the guilty. He is the cause of the ill done by them subsequently in his kingdom, and he is the cause of the resulting lawlessness of others, not to mention that the evil person becomes more deeply immersed in evil. Therefore although a good and righteous king has the power to cancel punishments, yet he cannot, for if he cancels them he does not do what is good but what is bad. It should be recognized that all forms of punishment as well as of temptation in the next life have good as their end in view.