This question is asked a lot in many different ways. It is a very involved question and has a lengthy answer. The short answer is, it takes a Just and Loving God, but let me explain.
For God to truly know that we love him he had to give us the ability to choose NOT to love him. For this reason we were given free will. We can choose to love and follow Christ; or we can choose to disobey and not follow Christ. It is our free will. When a person has the ability to choose not to love you and they choose to do so anyway, you can be sure that they honestly love you. It would have been easy for God to create us with the capacity to only love him. But then we would all be just like robots, obeying his command to love by obedience, and not by choice.
Next you must understand how Holy our God really is. He IS holiness (1 Samuel 2:2); He IS righteousness (Psalm 48:10); He CANNOT be together with unrighteousness (2 Corinthians 6:14). The two can not exist in the same area (Habakkuk 1:13-17 speaking of his moral perfection and holiness). By choosing not to love God, or not to follow him, you are going against his will for your life. Because He IS holy, his will is also holy (Psalm 145:17). By not following his will, you are, in effect, sinning, or as it translates literally "missing the mark" (James 4:17):. By saying God is being harsh to institute a death penalty for sin really says you do not understand how holy God is, and how un-holy sin is. The two are anathema of each other.
That doesn't seem fair, you say? If that is where the story ends, I would agree. But it doesn't end there. If it did, then God would NOT be loving or JUST. He can't just make up a set of rules, institute a death penalty for not following them, then tell us these rules are impossible for us to follow and rest on the "I'm Holier than thou excuse" and expect everything to be OK. Good for us that he doesn't. You see, being a holy and just God means there MUST be a punishment for our sins (Hebrews 9:22; Romans 6:23). Being a loving God means providing a propitiation for that punishment so that we don't have to die and be separated from the God that loves us (John 3:16; 1 John 2:1-5; 2 Corinthians 5:21). If God did not provide Jesus to come down to Earth to die in our place for the punishment of our sins that we could not avoid to commit, then he would not be loving OR fair. He had to give us free will to test if we truly loved him. But in doing so, he allowed that we would choose NOT to love him and sin. Since "the wages of sin is death", God HAD to provide a way that our penalty for sinning would be satisfied (thereby maintaining his JUST-ness) while at the same time preserving those that loved him for eternity (thereby maintaining his Love). This is the Gospel message; that Christ was born, died for your sins, arose on the third day proving His sacrifice was sufficient for God, and appeared to many people as witnesses to his resurrection (1 Corinthians 15:1-11). Now the only thing that stops us in receiving his sacrificial gift is us. We must acknowledge that we believe Jesus did what he said he did and accept his gift of Love in order that we might be saved (Romans 10:8-13). The bible says there is only one unpardonable sin, and that is the blasphemy of the Holy Spirit. It is the job of the Holy Spirit to convict us of our sins and point us to Jesus Christ (John 16:8), by continually rejecting that conviction, you are saying that you do not want the gift that Jesus offered (Matthew 12:31-32). And if you were to die in that state, unrepentant of your sins, you would die and forever be separated from your God (Matthew 25:41-46). What else but a Just and Loving God would have a plan for salvation that cost his creation nothing to receive except belief in Him and His plan?
~Paul
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