God's Judgment/God's Love

Earlier this week, my friend Neece posted this on Facebook:

I helped represent our local secular humanist organization at Diversity Week at WVU today. A girl walked past and said, "Oh, you guys are atheists?" To which I said, yes. And she said, "I hope you die." How very Christian of her, don't you think?

It makes me sad any time I see this kind of thing. I don't think that it's indicative of most people of faith, but I know that it's certainly a larger number than I'd like to believe. There are those who believe that God hates people, and that as such, it is apparently okay for them to hate right along with him.

For many of us though, we still place conditions on God's love. He's loving BUT he's just. He's loving BUT he's wrathful. He's loving BUT he's holy. So we might not say something quite so hateful as "I hope you die" to an atheist, but we know that they'll get theirs in the end. We just let God do the judging and we can keep our hands clean.

Then my friend Tony posted this on Twitter this morning:

"All of God's judgement 

is toward that which interferes with His love" 

~Mike Bickle

What would happen if I started asking myself, "Is this interfering with God's love?" when I starting adding the buts in my description of God? Would it change how I interact with people? Would it change how I treat myself?

What do you think?