God Doesn't 'Punish', But Sin Does

I've been thinking for a couple of weeks about how I would describe my understanding of God's reaction to sin, sin's effect on a person, and the way God is described at times as vengeful. I began wondering if my conception was orthodox, and upon reflection, I think it is.* Feel free to comment on that conclusion after reading my ruminations below... What prompts me, by the way, to expound on this here is a post I came across on Adrian Warnock's blog entitled, "God isn't angry with Christians when they sin."

Seems to me, when we sin, God doesn't get angry with us (or hate us or wish us ill, etc.) at all since God loves us and is infinitely generous, infinitely patient and forgiving and infinitely desiring of our ultimate homecoming. God does hate the sin itself, because of the effect of the sin, which is to cause resistance within us to God. Since God's given us free will, that blockage we build up by sin can prevent us from accepting the grace God is constantly pouring out on us. The upshot of thinking this is, when I hear language referring to God "smiting sinners" or "inflicting punishment on sinners," I automatically assume that it is figurative language (as when we read that God is surprised by something, which would be impossible for someone outside of time to be) and translate it to mean, "Those people have, by misusing their free will to sin, built up blockades against God and His grace, and are suffering because they are willingly cutting themselves off from Him." Penitence and penance are, of course, necessary, because they (with God's help, even through our best effort at shutting Him out) realign our will to accept all of what God wants to give us. So what this amounts to may be one step further even than the idea, "God isn't angry with Christians when they sin." It amounts to believing that sin certainly has a punishing effect on the sinner, but that God doesn't punish.

* Not wanting to toss all this out here without providing some reference to back up this line of thinking, I turned after posting the original piece, to the Catechism of the Catholic Church for backup. This bit is from section 1472 on "The Punishments of Sin": The text first lists the two kinds of punishments for sin, eternal and temporal, and then goes on to say, "These two punishments must not be conceived as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin." I realize, of course, non-Catholics may find this less authoritative than I do...