The last point you make (in some desperation) is important. What does the language of ‘wrath’ actually refer to? Presumably it is meant to tell us something about God, and to understand this we need to see it in covenantal terms. For example, once the land had been taken, the people made a conscious corporate decision to serve the Lord rather than the gods of their fathers or the gods of the Amorites (Joshua 24:14-18), even though Joshua warned them: ‘If you forsake the LORD and serve foreign gods, then he will turn and do you harm and consume you, after having done you good.’

They did forsake the Lord, they worshipped foreign gods, they acted unjustly, and so on. So God became angry. They had reneged on their solemn agreement to be a holy people devoted to YHWH. In that regard, the wrath of God is an inevitable implication of the covenant, it is a mark of how serious a thing it is to be the people of the living God.

But the other thing to take into account is the geo-politics. What were the people of Israel supposed to think when the Babylonians invaded? Would they have concluded that God was really pleased with them? Was this a sign of blessing? The language of God’s wrath is one of the ways in which, both before and after the event, Israel made sense of national suffering in the light of the crucial conviction that God had made them his own people.

The prophet Jesus, like John the Baptist before him, foresaw judgment coming again on a sinful, rebellious, hypocritical people. That’s the theological analysis. It corresponds to a political insight: that sooner or later the Jews would start a fight with Rome and lose it badly. The outcome would be an end to the temple system, the land, and any semblance of self-government as a nation. The only hope he saw was to create around himself an alternative faithful, justified Israel, which would walk the narrow path leading eventually to life. But in the process he fell victim to the destruction that would soon come on the whole nation: he was destroyed by Rome, by the instrument of God’s wrath. He suffered the historical ‘punishment’ that was Israel’s, but it meant that the people would continue, centred around the temple of his body, inheriting the whole world and not just the land of Canaan, and with Christ himself as king.

The cross was the point where love and judgment met head-on. You see the same collision in the prophets over and over again: ‘in my wrath I struck you, but in my favor I have had mercy on you’ (Is. 60:10).

I’m not sure where this gets us, but it seems to me that there is a world of difference between Israel’s painful struggle with its sense of calling and identity in an often hostile world and your caricature of a pathological God. The caricature is a product of our feverish modern evangelical culture. Take a couple of aspirin, wait for the fever to subside, and maybe things will not look quite so nightmarish.

An emerging theology needs the critical realist sense that scripture clings to history.