Answering Some Questions...

I just checked out this blog's 'papa blog' - the One Year Bible companion blog from our church - and this helps put my worry about Christianity stemming from a Judgmental God into a little context:

Remember that God is both perfectly just and perfectly loving.  Sometimes it seems like the two cannot coexist, because if justice is to be done perfectly then everyone God loves deserves death, but if God is to love perfectly how can he bring death to those he loves.  It is a huge conundrum and that is why Jesus was the only way to redeem, or fix, the situation. God could bring his perfect justice on Jesus. 

Amen, man. Amen.

One of the other things I've been struggling with is the idea that God gave us free will, or the ability to choose - but then we get burned for choosing wrong. I asked this on the papa blog - here was the response from Pastor Sharkey - that's his real last name by the way :)

As I have stated in a couple other posts, God’s primary reason for giving free will has to do with worship of him, and glory to him (see post). This free will gives us the freedom to make our own choices, it does not however, free us from the consequences of those choices. Sometimes those consequences are immediate (e.g. Lot’s wife turns into pillar of salt), sometimes the consequences are slow to come (e.g. Methuselah lived until he was 969 “and then he died”), but there are always consequences. The reason for these consequences has to do with God’s holiness. God is holy, he is untouchably perfect, therefore he cannot stand to be in the presence of Sin. Because sin has become a part of human nature since the fall of Adam and Eve there is separation between God and humans.

He has great wrath toward us because of this sin in our lives. Throughout scripture we see God display this wrath, and it reaches a paramount in the New Testament when Jesus receives the weight of God’s wrath on the cross. Of course part of God’s holiness also means that he is perfectly loving, and that is why God provides a way back to him through Jesus. But still we have our free will, the free will to choose or to reject Jesus as Savior. You and I are going to make wrong choices and we are going to get burned for them, that’s the consequence of making wrong choices. But the good news is that even in the midst of our sin and wrong choices God makes a way for us.

 My thought was a little simpler, but I think it falls in line with Pastor Sharkey's explanation; its simply this: making wrong choices is bad for you. Quite literally, if you put your hand in fire, you're going to get burned. That was a bad choice. So then by that rationalization, choosing to be apart from God is bad for us.