Verses 47-48
Here it becomes clear that God was using the trees in the south to represent Judah’s people. The Lord announced that He was going to judge the Judahites as when a fire sweeps through a forest. All types of people would suffer, the outwardly righteous (green tree) and the outwardly unrighteous (dry tree), and the judgment would affect the whole land. The fact that the Babylonians would capture and kill the righteous and the wicked does not contradict chapter 18, which teaches that every person is responsible for his or her own actions. There the point was that God does not punish people for the sins of others but for their own sins. Here the point is that the coming invasion would affect everyone. Everyone would eventually realize that Yahweh had brought this terrible judgment on the Judahites.
"The most devastating consequences [sic] by far of Judah’s covenant failure was her depopulation by exile." [Note: Merrill, p. 373.]
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