In Isaiah, chapter twenty-four, verse six, “Therefore hath the curse devoured the earth, and they that dwell therein are desolate: therefore the inhabitants of the earth are burned, and few men left.” The wages of sin are death and destruction, as in Romans six, verse twenty-three. This truth is demonstrated on an international scale at the end of time, when all who do not repent and turn to God will be destroyed. The devastation will be like that of a fire that burns and devours completely.
The sense is that the inhabitants of the land are brought under the withering, burning, consuming effect of that wrath; and the same effects are produced by it as are seen when a fire runs over a field or a forest. The impression is that the inhabitants of the land were wasted away under the wrath of God, so that few were left; as the trees of the forest are destroyed before a raging fire.
An example of such wrath is in Second Kings twenty-four, verses fourteen to sixteen, when Jehoiachin, king of Judah, did evil in God’s sight, that Nebuchadnezzar, king of Babylon, and his servants, took captive. “And he carried away all Jerusalem, and all the princes, and all the mighty men of valour, even ten thousand captives, and all the craftsmen and smiths: none remained, save the poorest sort of the people of the land. And he carried away Jehoiachin to Babylon, and the king’s mother, and the king’s wives, and his officers, and the mighty of the land, those carried he into captivity from Jerusalem to Babylon. And all the men of might, even seven thousand, and craftsmen and smiths a thousand, all that were strong and apt for war, even them the king of Babylon brought captive to Babylon.”