The High Cost of Sin Bread Text: Lamentations 1:11
Introduction: The Covenantal Stomach
We live in a gluttonous age. I am not speaking merely of our waistlines, though that is certainly part of it. I am speaking of a deeper, more voracious spiritual gluttony. Our culture is one that demands everything and is thankful for nothing. It is a culture that has been feasting for generations on the accumulated moral, spiritual, and cultural capital of Christendom, all the while sneering at the Chef. We have devoured the bread of civility, the wine of liberty, and the rich meat of a shared moral consensus, and now that the pantry is bare and the cellar is dry, we look around in a bewildered stupor, wondering where it all went.
The book of Lamentations is a bucket of ice-cold water thrown on the face of just such a stupor. It is the morning-after of a centuries-long covenantal bender. Jerusalem, the holy city, the princess among the provinces, has become a harlot, then a widow, and now a starving beggar in the streets. This is not an accident. This is not bad luck. This is the predictable, iron-clad, covenantal consequence of apostasy. God had warned His people, with painstaking clarity, what would happen if they forsook Him. In Deuteronomy 28, He laid out the blessings for obedience and the curses for disobedience. And among those curses was the terror of the siege, the desperation of famine, where a donkey's head would become a gourmet meal.
What we are reading in Lamentations is not poetry for the sake of poetry. It is a post-mortem. It is the inspired autopsy of a culture that died by its own hand, because it forsook its own God. And in our text today, we are brought down to the most elemental level of that judgment: the stomach. All the high-flown idolatries, all the sophisticated political rebellions, all the proud intellectual conceits are here reduced to a desperate, guttural groan for a crust of bread. This is what sin does. It promises a feast and delivers a famine. It promises to make you a god and leaves you groveling in the dust for scraps.
We must not read this as ancient history, patting ourselves on the back that we are more enlightened. We are Jerusalem. Our sins are Jerusalem's sins. And the rumbling in the stomach of our culture is the same hunger, born of the same rebellion. This passage forces us to confront the true nature of sin's economy, where the price of a moment's pleasure is an eternity of want, and where the only thing left to trade for life is life itself.
The Text
All her people are sighing, seeking bread;
They have given their desirable things for food
To restore their souls.
“See, O Yahweh, and look,
For I am despised.”
(Lamentations 1:11 LSB)
The Universal Groan (v. 11a)
The verse begins with the totality of the judgment.
"All her people are sighing, seeking bread..." (Lamentations 1:11a)
The word here is "all." This is not a localized famine affecting only the poor. This is a comprehensive, society-wide judgment. The princes and the priests, the merchants and the mothers, the elders and the infants, are all united in one democratic reality: hunger. Sin is a great leveler. When a nation turns its back on God, the consequences do not politely observe class distinctions. The foundations are destroyed, and when that happens, the penthouse and the outhouse both come down in the same heap of rubble.
They are "sighing," or groaning. This is the sound of a soul under immense pressure. It is the sound of life being squeezed out. And what are they seeking? Not luxury, not entertainment, not political power. They are seeking bread. The most basic element of sustenance. All their previous idols, Baal, Molech, the high places, the foreign alliances, have proven to be nothing but sawdust. You cannot eat your idols. You cannot find nourishment in your rebellion. When God withdraws His blessing, all the sophisticated structures of a society are revealed to be utterly dependent on the simple things, like bread, that only He can provide.
This is a picture of spiritual reality. The man without Christ is starving. He may be seeking to fill his belly with a thousand different things, career, pleasure, knowledge, reputation, but he is fundamentally seeking bread. He is seeking that which can only satisfy, and he is looking for it in all the wrong places. As Jesus said, "I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me shall not hunger" (John 6:35). The universal groan of fallen humanity is a cry of spiritual starvation, a deep sigh for the bread of heaven.
The Fool's Bargain (v. 11b)
Next, we see the desperate economics of this divine judgment.
"They have given their desirable things for food To restore their souls." (Lamentations 1:11b)
Here is the great reversal. The "desirable things," the treasures, the heirlooms, the wedding rings, the articles of beauty and craft, all the things they had once lived for and valued, are now worthless. They are being traded away for a loaf of bread. Why? "To restore their souls." The Hebrew here is literally "to restore the life."
This is the logic of sin played in reverse. In their prosperity, they traded the one truly desirable thing, their relationship with Yahweh, for the trinkets of paganism and the baubles of rebellion. They sold their birthright for a mess of idolatrous pottage. They gave away the ultimate treasure for cheap thrills. Now, in the crucible of judgment, God is forcing them to see the true value of things. He is showing them that when you are starving, a diamond is worthless and a piece of bread is a treasure beyond price.
This is a profound spiritual lesson. The world is constantly trying to get us to make this fool's bargain. It tells us to trade our integrity for a promotion. To trade our sexual purity for a moment of pleasure. To trade our faithfulness to Christ for the approval of men. To trade our "desirable things," the treasures of heaven, for the fleeting sustenance of this world. But judgment day is coming for every man and for every nation. And on that day, the market will be corrected. On that day, many a man will wish he could trade all his earthly accomplishments, all his hoarded wealth, all his "desirable things," for one crumb of the Bread of Life, which he had despised for so long.
The Despised City's Plea (v. 11c)
The verse concludes with a direct, desperate address to God.
"See, O Yahweh, and look, For I am despised." (Lamentations 1:11c)
After describing the situation, the voice of the city itself, personified as a woman, breaks through. And her plea is not, "See how I am suffering," but rather, "See how I am despised." The hunger is terrible, the loss is catastrophic, but the deepest wound is the shame. She was once the beloved of Yahweh, the city on a hill, the praise of all the earth. Now she is an object of contempt. The very nations that once paid her tribute now mock her in her degradation.
This is the heart of covenantal shame. To be despised by the world is one thing; a Christian should expect it. But to be made despicable because of your own sin, to have brought reproach upon the name of your God, that is the true agony. This is the pain of public sin. When the church compromises with the world, when she adopts its sexual ethics, its political idolatries, its therapeutic gospels, she does not win the world's respect. She earns its contempt. The world knows a fraud when it sees one, and it despises nothing more than a church that has lost its saltiness and is good for nothing but to be trodden underfoot.
And yet, where does she turn in her shame? She turns to Yahweh. "See, O Yahweh, and look." This is the beginning of true repentance. She is not hiding her shame. She is not making excuses. She is holding up the filthy rags of her sin and her disgrace for God to see. She is agreeing with God about her condition. She is saying, "You are right. Your judgment is just. I have become what you warned I would become. I am despised, and I deserve it. Look." This is the only path back. It is the prayer of the tax collector: "God, be merciful to me, a sinner." It is the confession that lays the foundation for grace.
Conclusion: The Bread and the Shame
So what do we do with a verse like this? We are a people, like Jerusalem, who have been feasting on God's blessings for a very long time. We have our own "desirable things," and we are tempted daily to trade our birthright for the world's thin soup.
First, we must recognize that all sin is a fool's bargain. Every time you choose sin, you are trading a treasure for trash. You are giving away something of eternal worth for something that cannot sustain you. The end of that road is always spiritual starvation. It is a desperate search for bread in a land of dust and ashes.
Second, we must understand the nature of shame. Our culture tells us that shame is the great evil to be avoided at all costs. The Bible teaches that there is a godly shame that is the gateway to repentance and restoration. Jerusalem's cry, "I am despised," is not a cry of self-pity. It is a cry of self-recognition. It is an acknowledgment of the ugliness of her sin. We too must be willing to see our sin as God sees it, as something truly despicable, something that brought the ultimate shame upon our Savior at the cross.
And that is the final and most glorious point. Jerusalem's plea, "See, O Yahweh," was ultimately answered at Calvary. For on the cross, God did see, and He did look. He looked upon His own Son, who became despised for us. Isaiah tells us He was "despised and rejected by men" (Isaiah 53:3). He hung there, bearing all our covenantal shame, all our disgrace, all our filth. He experienced the ultimate famine of soul, crying out, "My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?"
He did this so that we, who had traded everything for nothing, could be offered everything for nothing. He, the Bread of Life, was broken so that we, the starving, might be fed. He took our shame so that we might be clothed in His righteousness. The only way to escape the judgment of this text is to flee to the one who bore that judgment for us. We must come to Him, confessing our hunger, acknowledging our shame, and we will find that He does not despise a broken and contrite heart. He fills it, He restores it, and He makes it truly desirable once more.