Reflections on Divine Obligation

While walking back from class this afternoon, I found myself reconsidering the teaching that we human beings don't deserve anything from God (or, at least, not a salvific, restorative relationship with God).
The doctrine I'm familiar with, as I have accepted it in the past, states that because human beings are fallen, and because we fell because we broke the good relationship between us and God by our sin, God doesn't owe us salvation. God extends salvation to us not based on our own merit, but rather as a free gift, grounded in God's love for us.
Here's what I was thinking earlier this afternoon. According to William James, moral obligation comes from a person making a demand, either on herself or on some other person. Now I'm willing to grant for the present discussion that God's demands, on Godself and on human persons, constitute the highest level of obligation. From James' perspective (which, to be clear, I'm just adopting for the sake of convenience; I'm not committed exactly to his view), because God is ideally, perfectly good, God's ultimate moral demand is that as many demands as possible be harmoniously satisfied. In a sense, this is to say that God wants the best of all possible worlds to be actualized--where every person has as much of what they want as they can, all wants considered. (James steps over the qualitative/quantitative distinction in valuing competing wants/demands in a way I think is awkward and constitutes a serious flaw in his view--but I'll not go into this now).
OK. Now, what does it mean to say that God is or is not obliged to grant salvation to us?
I am not sure a clear distinction can be maintained between what God owes to us and what God wants to give us, because God's demands on Godself, and on us, constitute grounds of moral obligation. We deserve what we deserve, on a theocentric model of obligation, because it's what God wants us to have. God wants us to have a restored relationship with God (which is in my theology equivalent to "salvation"). Therefore, we deserve a restored relationship with God.
Any demand that we make on God, insofar as we are appealing to God's very nature and God's very own desires--such as God's desire to provide for and relate to us in a salvific way--is a righteous demand. So it isn't really that presumptious or arrogant to say that we deserve salvation. As far as God is concerned, since it is something God wants for us, it is something that we deserve.

OK. Now, here's what I'm thinking about this now. We can approach this whole situation from a different model of breaking and reconciling relationships. Since we are the ones who broke the original relationship with God, it is in a sense our responsibility to make things right. God doesn't have any responsibility to initiate reconciliation--nor to accept any of our overtures of reconciliation. (However, God is still responsible to take what action is necessary to accomplish what God wants. If God wants reconciliation, God is responsible to take action to make reconciliation happen; this is closer to the argument I was making earlier).

How about this? Let's go back to the our-own-merit vs. God's-free-gift categories. Even on a system of obligations according to which God owes us salvation because God wants to give us salvation, this recognizes that God's free choice and God's desires and God's love are the determining factors. I'm not sure there is a concept of human merit that makes sense apart from what God determines we deserve, but maybe it is still pretty orthodox to say that we don't deserve anything apart from what God's free love for us makes us deserve. Now it sounds like I'm explaining the Reformed concept of Justification?!

...These rambling thought have been brought to you by....

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"He Himself is our Peace." (Eph 2)