I suspect that the reason we even think like that—even for a moment—is that in the Old Testament the pictures of God’s wrath are temporal, expressed primarily in historical terms. In the New Testament the pictures of God’s wrath are primarily (though not exclusively) in final eschatological and apocalyptic terms—and most of us do not really believe the latter, so we are not frightened of them. Our culture is so present-oriented that we filter out depictions of final judgment; we are not frightened