Jeremiah 21:14 - Matthew Poole's English Annotations on the Holy Bible

I will punish you; in the Hebrew it is, I will visit upon you. God's visitations are either of mercy, Psalms 80:14, Psalms 106:4, or of judgment; therefore the sense is here rightly given by our translators punish. According to the fruit of your doings; the fruit of men's doings is the product of their actions; God punisheth the fruit of our doings. In showing mercy, he acts from prerogative; in punishments, he doth but fill men with their own ways, and give them according to the fruit of their doings; so Jeremiah 21:12. I will kindle a fire in the forest thereof; by the forest he either meaneth the forest of Lebanon, or their houses made up of wood cut out of that forest, or their idolatrous groves. And it shall devour all things round about it; and this fire he saith should not determine in the destruction only of this city, but in the total destruction of all the country adjacent to Jerusalem.