Jeremiah 25:33, commentary and pictures

In its first setting the sentence of doom was so terrible that the multitudes who heard could scarcely grasp its awful import, so its meaning was made plain by the draining of a cup filled with the wine of divine wrath, drunk first by Jerusalem and the cities of Judah and the kings thereof, then by Pharaoh king of Egypt with his servants and his princes and all his people, and then by many other nations of earth until God's purpose should have been fulfilled. On the day of the Lord's punishment the slain of the Lord will lie from one end of the earth even to the other end of the earth, scattered across the whole earth. They shall have no one to lament them, nor to gather them, nor to bury them, but their bodies shall lie unburied upon the ground as dung.

The verse points to the final judgment after God has judged the nations, after the seven last plagues have fallen and after the saints have been delivered by the voice of God, when every person has chosen sides between Christ and His commandments on the one hand and apostasy on the other. It is the punishment of every opposing power, showing the complete and public destruction of those who blaspheme against God and oppose His faithful servants.

Their deaths come as God's judgment upon transgression and wickedness through the outpouring of His wrath, and through violent conflict as the wicked in the strife of their own passions turn their rage against one another. With the earth thus strewn with dead bodies, the devastated earth then becomes Satan's confinement for a thousand years, where he sees the results of his rebellion.