God is Good, but what does this mean?

The priest at my church has asserted, as do other Orthodox I've read and heard, that God is Good. I completely agree with this. This is the teaching of the Church since the beginning, and can even be seen in God's abiding love for the Israelites during the Old Covenant. Where I am having difficulty understanding God's goodness is when it comes to suffering. According to "A prayer in time of trouble," found in my Antiochian Pocket Prayer book, "[A]ll trials of this life are given by Thee for our chastisement, when we drift away from thee, and disobey thy commandments." Does this then mean that every suffering I have is sent by God? Perhaps I did not understand my correctly (which is quite possible) but the way he was speaking made it sound as though God does not harm us in any way--that our sufferings are not of God. If all suffering is of God for our chastisement, then what of horrendous sufferings--such as the Holocaust, the Gulags, wars, chronic illnesses, and so on. Did God send these for our chastisement? Recently, I have read a book on Father Isidore, a simple Russian monk. At one point in the book, Fr. Isidore tells a sickly monk that he should rejoice in his illness, since his illness shows that God loves him. Perhaps I am not thinking correctly, but I always saw sufferings as the work of the Devil, perhaps transformed by God to our benefit, but nonetheless the work of the Devil working in a fallen world.

My priest never has spoken of God's wrath, or God's anger, but only of God's mercy. Now, I come from a Roman Catholic background, and although the "Hell homilies" no longer are vogue in Roman Catholic churches today, I know that, until recently, there were, and still may be found in some traditional churches. Yet, from what I can tell, the Orthodox do no really concern themselves with the "wrath of God," of God's "righteous anger" at man for sin. They focus instead on God's mercy and the need to repent, not because God is angry and will destroy us if we don't, but because it is what we need to do to receive forgiveness.