When the Blessings Run Dry Text: Lamentations 2:12
Introduction: The Anatomy of a Curse
We live in a sentimental age. We want a God who is all comfort and no confrontation, all blessing and no balancing of the books. We have domesticated the Lion of Judah and tried to turn Him into a housecat that purrs on command. But the God of Scripture is holy, just, and jealous for His own name. He is a covenant-keeping God, which is a profound comfort for the faithful, but it is a terrifying reality for the faithless. A covenant has two sides: blessings for obedience and curses for disobedience. We love to preach on Deuteronomy 28, verses 1 through 14. But we get squeamish and start shuffling our feet when we get to verses 15 through 68.
The book of Lamentations is what it looks like when the curses of the covenant come home to roost. It is the inspired anatomy of a divine judgment. This is not some abstract theological treatise; it is a raw, visceral, heart-wrenching account of the consequences of persistent, high-handed rebellion against the living God. The prophet Jeremiah, the weeping prophet, walks through the ruins of Jerusalem after the Babylonian siege, and he records what he sees. And what he sees is the logical and just outworking of a broken covenant.
Our text today is a single, devastating verse. It is a miniature portrait of a society completely undone. It is what happens when God removes His hand of blessing and allows a people to reap what they have sown. It is a picture of the most innocent and vulnerable members of a society bearing the brunt of the judgment brought on by the sins of their fathers. And it is a stark warning to us, lest we think that we can continue to provoke God indefinitely and not face similar consequences.
The Text
They say to their mothers, "Where is grain and wine?" As they faint like a wounded man In the open squares of the city, As their life is poured out On their mothers' bosom.
(Lamentations 2:12 LSB)
The Cry for Covenant Blessings (v. 12a)
The verse opens with a heartbreaking question from the lips of dying children:
"They say to their mothers, 'Where is grain and wine?'" (Lamentations 2:12a)
This is not simply a cry for a snack. In the biblical imagination, "grain and wine" are not just basic foodstuffs; they are covenantal symbols. They represent the blessing and provision of God. From the very beginning, God promised Israel that if they were obedient, "He will love you and bless you and multiply you; He will also bless the fruit of your womb and the fruit of your ground, your grain and your new wine and your oil" (Deuteronomy 7:13). Grain and wine were the tangible signs of God's favor, the physical evidence that all was right between God and His people. They were the stuff of life, joy, and prosperity.
So when the children cry out, "Where is grain and wine?" they are asking a profound theological question, even if they don't know it. They are asking, "Where is the blessing of God? Where is the favor of God? Where is the substance of the covenant?" And the answer is found in the silence of their mothers and the emptiness of the storehouses. The blessings have been withdrawn because the covenant has been broken.
Notice who they ask. They ask their mothers. In a rightly-ordered world, a mother is the source of comfort, nourishment, and security. A child's first instinct in a crisis is to turn to his mother. But here, the mothers are helpless. The very fabric of the family, the foundational unit of society, has been shredded. The mothers, who should be providing, can only watch their children starve. This is the curse of covenant-breaking in its most intimate and excruciating form. It overturns the created order. God had warned them that if they turned away, the curse would be so severe that tenderhearted mothers would boil their own children for food (Deut. 28:56-57; Lam. 4:10). This verse is the prelude to that ultimate horror.
The Public Humiliation (v. 12b)
The scene of this tragedy is not hidden away in private. It is a public spectacle.
"As they faint like a wounded man In the open squares of the city..." (Lamentations 2:12b)
The children are not merely hungry; they are fainting "like a wounded man." This is the language of the battlefield. Starvation is a slow, brutal siege against the body, and these children are casualties of war. They are collapsing, not from a sword wound, but from the gnawing wound of famine. The judgment of God has turned the city's children into the walking wounded.
And where does this happen? "In the open squares of the city." The public square was the center of civic life, the place of commerce, justice, and community. It was where the life of the city was on full display. Now, it has become a public morgue. The shame of Judah's sin is not a private affair. It is laid bare for all to see. Their covenantal infidelity is being broadcast in the open squares through the bodies of their dying children. When a nation rebels against God, the consequences are never private. The rot that begins in the heart eventually bursts forth into the public square, and the whole world sees the disgrace.
We see this in our own day. The moral and spiritual rebellion that we have cultivated for decades in our homes and churches is now on full display in our public squares. The confusion, the violence, the perversion, the despair, it is all the public fruit of private apostasy. We have sown the wind in our pulpits and seminaries, and we are reaping the whirlwind in our streets.
The Inversion of Life (v. 12c)
The verse concludes with an image of profound and tragic reversal.
"As their life is poured out On their mothers' bosom." (Lamentations 2:12c)
A mother's bosom is supposed to be the place where life begins. It is the place of nursing, of warmth, of life being poured into a child. But here, in this city under God's curse, it has become the place where life is poured out. The source of life has become the deathbed. The very place that symbolizes nurture and hope is now the site of the final, gasping breaths of a generation.
This is the ultimate end of sin. Sin is fundamentally anti-creation. It takes God's good order and twists it, inverts it, and turns it toward death. It takes the life-giving institution of the family and makes it a theater of death. It takes the blessings of God and turns them into curses. When a people forsakes the fountain of living waters, they should not be surprised when all their cisterns are broken and dry, and life itself pours out into the dust.
Conclusion: The Poured-Out Life
This is a bleak and terrible picture. And we must not rush past the horror of it. We must sit with it. We must understand that sin has consequences, and that covenant rebellion leads to ruin. This is what our sin deserves. This is the wage of sin, which is death. The children in the streets of Jerusalem are a picture of all of us in our natural state, starving for the bread of life, wounded by sin, and dying in the public square of a fallen world.
But this is not the final word. This horrifying image of a life poured out in judgment is a dark foreshadowing of another life that would be poured out. On a hill outside this same city, centuries later, the life of the Son of God was poured out unto death (Isaiah 53:12). He became like a wounded man, for He was wounded for our transgressions. He bore the full, undiluted curse of the broken covenant that we deserved.
He took the famine upon Himself so that He could become for us the Bread of Life, the true Grain from heaven. His blood was shed, poured out, so that He could become for us the New Wine of the New Covenant. He endured the public shame, naked and dying in the open, so that we might be clothed in His righteousness.
Because Christ's life was poured out in judgment, our lives can be filled with His. The cry of the starving child, "Where is grain and wine?" is answered definitively at the communion table. Here is the grain. Here is the wine. Here is the blessing of God. Here is the favor of God. Here is the substance of a better covenant, sealed in the blood of the Son. The judgment described in Lamentations is real, and it is terrible. But the good news of the gospel is that the judgment has already fallen upon another, so that all who faint and fall into the arms of Jesus will not have their life poured out, but will instead be filled to overflowing with His.