The wrath of God is part of His justice, where mercy triumphs over judgment. Kalomiros says "His justice means His goodness and love, which are given in an unjust manner, that is, God always gives without taking anything in return, and He gives to persons like us who are not worthy of receiving...to the evil and impious."
And just as His thoughts and ways are not ours, neither is His justice anything like ours. From our rational point of view, His justice is "not at all just since it punishes and demands satisfaction from persons which were not at all responsible for the sin of their forefathers."
God is love and what can Love do but offer mercy and forgiveness, even to the wicked? To our very last breath, God's "punishments are loving means of correction, as long as anything can be corrected and healed in this life."
By necessity, the Scriptures describe God in anthropomorphic terms which often mislead us into a tendency to humanize God, which is a Greek pagan legacy. Ancient Greeks thought of gods as immortal and powerful humans, with human emotions and character shortcomings of jealousy, passion, etc.
We Orthodox do no such thing. It is our apophatic understanding that "God neither rejoices nor grows angry, for to rejoice and to be offended are passions; nor is He won over by the gifts of those who honor Him, for that would mean He is swayed by pleasure. It is not right that the Divinity feel pleasure or displeasure from human conditions."
Consequently, His justice -- His mercy -- is not based on passions, pleasure or satisfaction in human terms, as humans see justice. Western juridical theology incorporates this profoundly human aspect of justice as God's. Catholics and Protestants "rather consider God as being chained by a superior force, by a gloomy and implacable Necessity like the one which governed the pagan gods. This Necessity obliges Him to return evil for evil and does not permit Him to pardon and to forget the evil done against His will, unless an infinite satisfaction is offered to Him."
This stems from the fact that St. Augustine, for reasons that may have a lot to do with his own personal failings and guilt developed this idea that it was God Who deprived us of His Grace and punished us with death, rather than see that we rejected God and His Grace. Thus, to the Orthodox mindset, the whole of Western Christianity is turned upside down from the start and consequently the rest of the Western phronema follows in the same fashion.
Thus, the wrath of God is understood in the opposite way as well. We do not see God's wrath as something He does to punish humanity that He loves, as it is understood in the West. God's judgment is mercy -- but to those who hate Him, it is a wrath. His burning love for humanity that warms and animates the believers, scorches, annoys and destroys those who hate Him.
If any one of us ends up in hell, it will be our doing, not His.
See what a caricature this is?
Could not the Creator have restored His work without that difficulty? He could, but He preferred to do it at his own cost, lest any further occasion should be given for that worst and most odious vice of ingratitude in man. (St. Bernard, Serm. xi, in Cant.)A thing is said to be necessary for a certain end in two ways. First, when the end cannot be without it; as food is necessary for the preservation of human life. Secondly, when the end is attained better and more conveniently, as a horse is necessary for a journey. In the first way it was not necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. For God with His omnipotent power could have restored human nature in many other ways. But in the second way it was necessary that God should become incarnate for the restoration of human nature. Hence Augustine says (De Trin. xii, 10): "We shall also show that other ways were not wanting to God, to Whose power all things are equally subject; but that there was not a more fitting way of healing our misery." (St. Thomas, Summa Theologiae, III q. 1 a. 2)
developed this idea that it was God Who deprived us of His Grace and punished us with death, rather than see that we rejected God and His Grace
A way was made for us to death through sin in Adam. For, "By one man sin entered into the world, and death by sin; and so death passed upon all men, in whom all have sinned." Of this way the devil was the mediator, the persuader to sin, and the caster down into death. For he, too, applied his one death to work out our double death. Since he indeed died in the spirit through ungodliness, but certainly did not die in the flesh: yet both persuaded us to ungodliness, and thereby brought it to pass that we deserved to come into the death of the flesh. We desired therefore the one through wicked persuasion, the other followed us by a just condemnation; and therefore it is written, "God made not death," since He was not Himself the cause of death; but yet death was inflicted on the sinner, through His most just retribution. Just as the judge inflicts punishment on the guilty; yet it is not the justice of the judge, but the desert of the crime, which is the cause of the punishment. (St. Augustine, De Trinitate, IV, 12:15)
Your argument is, as I read it, a protest against the idea of the loss of immortality as a divine punishment. But the Greek Fathers have the exact same doctrine!
But when through the Devil's malice and the woman's caprice, to which she succumbed as the more tender, and which she brought to bear upon the man, as she was the more apt to persuade, alas for my weakness! (for that of my first father was mine), he forgot the Commandment which had been given to him; he yielded to the baleful fruit; and for his sin he was banished, at once from the Tree of Life, and from Paradise, and from God; and put on the coats of skins ... that is, perhaps, the coarser flesh, both mortal and contradictory. This was the first thing that he learnt--his own shame; and he hid himself from God. Yet here too he makes a gain, namely death, and the cutting off of sin, in order that evil may not be immortal. Thus his punishment is changed into a mercy; for it is in mercy, I am persuaded, that God inflicts punishment. (St. Gregory Nazianzen, Oration 38, on the Theophany)
It was for this reason, too, that immediately after Adam had transgressed, as the Scripture relates, He pronounced no curse against Adam personally, but against the ground, in reference to his works, as a certain person among the ancients has observed: "God did indeed transfer the curse to the earth, that it might not remain in man." But man received, as the punishment of his transgression, the toilsome task of tilling the earth, and to eat bread in the sweat of his face, and to return to the dust from whence he was taken. (St. Irenaeus, Against Heresies, III, 23:3)
But as when a law has commanded abstinence from anything, and some one has not obeyed, it is obviously not the law which causes punishment, but the disobedience and transgression;--for a father sometimes enjoins on his own child abstinence from certain things, and when he does not obey the paternal order, he is flogged and punished on account of the disobedience; and in this case the actions themselves are not the [cause of] stripes, but the disobedience procures punishment for him who disobeys;--so also for the first man, disobedience procured his expulsion from Paradise. ... And God showed great kindness to man in this, that He did not suffer him to remain in sin for ever; but, as it were, by a kind of banishment, cast him out of Paradise, in order that, having by punishment expiated, within an appointed time, the sin, and having been disciplined, he should afterwards be restored. (Theophilus of Antioch, To Autolycus, II, 25-26)
MAN, then, was thus snared by the assault of the arch-fiend, and broke his Creator's command, and was stripped of grace and put off his confidence with God, and covered himself with the asperities of a toilsome life (for this is the meaning of the fig-leaves); and was clothed about with death, that is, mortality and the grossness of flesh (for this is what the garment of skins signifies); and was banished from Paradise by God's just judgment, and condemned to death, and made subject to corruption. (St. John Damascene, Exact Exposition of the Orthodox Faith, III, 1)