A couple of questions about Christianity that cause me some difficulty

[jogger08152]

1. Humans in Hell vs. the perfect love of God

The best way I've been able to think of this problem is by analogy: Consider a mother playing with her five-year-old son in the front yard. The son begins running toward the street. The mother sees that a car is speeding along on a course that looks like a threat to intersect her son's, such that the child may be hit by the car if she does nothing to prevent it. What will she do, assuming an ordinary mother-child relationship? Clearly, the answer is she will do anything she can to prevent her child from being struck by the car - she'll yell, she'll run and grab her child up, she'll even leap into the car's path to push him out of the way, if it comes to that.

Now suppose the same thing happens the next day. What will she do? I think so. And the next day, the same, and the day after that, ad infinitum. That is to say, given the opportunity to prevent harm to her child, she will never fail, never stop or give up.

Translation: God is the mother. Man is the young child (young, because like a five-year-old, when it comes to spiritual matters, even the most knowledgable priest/rabbi/imam/etc is ignorant, let alone struggling poker players). Hell is the truck.

What's difficult for me is: how can it be that the mother will rescue her child as long as she has the ability to do it, whether she is a new mother at 19, or a great-great-great grandmother at 121 bravely limping after her 99-year-old "youngster", whereas God, whose love is "infinitely" (whatever that means) more perfect than the mother's, and whose capacity to save the child is also infinite (that is, He can unfailingly save us if He wishes with no risk to any party, nor even any measurable expenditure of effort), will eventually (specifically, at the moment of death, which is to say, the moment that the veil of spiritual ignorance is lifted) allow a person to fall into Hell, which is "infinitely" worse than being run over by a truck?

2. Humans in Hell vs. The perfect justice of God

The question here is, if God is just, for what offense might I wind up in Hell, where Hell is a place of "infinite" suffering that lasts forever? It seems impossible for the punishment to fit any crime.

Specifically, suppose I steal a pair of blue jeans from Sears. I've committed a crime with a finite cost. (It might be difficult to measure: perhaps the manager gets fired because he failed to prevent shoplifting, and as a result his kid doesn't get to go to college, or whatnot. But whatever the cost is, it can be measured, so no matter how high the direct and indirect costs can be, they are finite and measurable, if you have God's sin-o-meter.) Given that I am completely culpable for my finite crime, even for obscure indirect consequences I could not have foreseen (and which, had I forseen them, I might not have been willing to commit the theft in the first place), can it be possible that I would be sentenced to infinite suffering by a just God?

Suppose the answer is no: shoplifting is small potatoes. But what if I murder someone? I think that my sin, though much more serious, is still finite: I have deprived an individual of some number of years of life (perhaps measurable with God's technology, perhaps not, but most certainly the number is < 200), I have caused the economic and emotional damage to his friends and family that accompany his death, etc. But the cost of this is all measurable, in that 20,000 years from now, the effects of my act will "almost" certainly not be felt by humanity, assuming humanity itself still exists at that future date. (There is of course the chance that this is incorrect: if I hadn't killed him, either my victim might have personally cured cancer, say, or maybe one of the descendants he would have fathered would have accomplished something similarly important. But for most murders, this will not be the case.)

I have also, of course, hastened his journey into the afterlife, so there is the chance that, if he is an unrepentant sinner who would have later repented, I have deprived him of a chance of attaining heaven and have consigned him to Hell instead - except that I can't see any way he winds up in Hell either, if God is just. (What did he do, after all? Steal some blue jeans?)

Does anybody (religious folks especially) have any thoughts on these?

Thanks,
Jogger

PS - I've received one answer to this second question that may adequately cover the problem - I'm not certain. I'll post this later, if people are interested.