The Theology of Dung Cakes
Introduction: God's Offensive Curriculum
We live in a soft and sentimental age. Our Christianity is often a sanitized, therapeutic affair, designed to soothe our anxieties and affirm our choices. We prefer a God who is respectable, manageable, and who would never, ever do anything that might be considered in poor taste. We want the Lion of Judah, but we want Him declawed and purring on the welcome mat. We want a Savior, but not one who speaks of hellfire. We want a Bible, but we tend to skip over the parts that are, shall we say, a bit earthy.
And then we come to a man like Ezekiel. Ezekiel is God's prophet of divine street theater. God does not simply give him a message to preach; God makes Ezekiel's life the sermon. He is commanded to perform a series of bizarre, humiliating, and deeply unsettling sign-acts. He is to lie on his side for over a year, build a model of a siege, and here, in our text, he is commanded to eat starvation rations cooked over a fuel source that would make a hardened soldier gag. This is not a polite, flannel-graph Sunday School lesson. This is God grabbing His people by the collar, shoving their faces into the filth of their own sin, and forcing them to smell it.
The modern church, in its quest for relevance and respectability, doesn't know what to do with a passage like this. We might try to allegorize it away, or dismiss it as a strange cultural artifact from a primitive time. But to do so is to miss the very heart of the message. God is demonstrating, in the most visceral way imaginable, the nature of sin and the reality of His covenant judgment. Israel had defiled His holy land with their idols. They had treated the holy things of God as common. In response, God is going to make their entire existence unclean. They wanted to be like the pagan nations? Fine. God will give them over to a pagan existence, where even the simple act of eating bread becomes a portrait of their own spiritual defilement. This is God's offensive curriculum, and we must have the stomach to learn what He is teaching.
The Text
Now as for you, take wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt; set them in one vessel and make them into bread for yourself; you shall eat it according to the number of the days that you lie on your side, 390 days. And your food which you eat shall be twenty shekels a day by weight; you shall eat it from time to time. The water you drink shall be the sixth part of a hin by measure; you shall drink it from time to time. You shall eat it as a barley cake, having baked it in their sight over human dung. Then Yahweh said, "Thus will the sons of Israel eat their bread unclean among the nations where I will banish them." But I said, "Ah, Lord Yahweh! Behold, I have never been defiled; for from my youth until now I have never eaten what died of itself or was torn by beasts, nor has any offensive meat ever entered my mouth." Then He said to me, "See, I will set for you cow's dung in place of human dung over which you will prepare your bread." Moreover, He said to me, "Son of man, behold, I am going to break the staff of bread in Jerusalem, and they will eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they will drink water by measure and in desolation because bread and water will be lacking; and they will be in desolation with one another and rot away in their iniquity.
(Ezekiel 4:9-17 LSB)
The Siege Rations of Judgment (vv. 9-11)
God begins with the menu for this long, prophetic performance.
"Now as for you, take wheat, barley, beans, lentils, millet, and spelt; set them in one vessel and make them into bread for yourself... And your food which you eat shall be twenty shekels a day by weight; you shall eat it from time to time. The water you drink shall be the sixth part of a hin by measure..." (Ezekiel 4:9-11)
This is not the recipe for some artisanal, multi-grain health loaf. This is the bread of desperation. When a city is under siege, and the fine wheat flour runs out, you start mixing in whatever you can find. You sweep the floor of the granary. Barley, beans, lentils, millet, spelt, all thrown together into one vessel. It is a picture of scarcity and the breakdown of normal provision. The quality of the food is the first thing to go.
Next, God dictates the quantity. Twenty shekels of this bread per day is about eight ounces. A sixth of a hin of water is roughly two-thirds of a quart. This is a meticulously measured starvation diet. It is just enough to keep a man alive, but in a state of constant weakness and hunger. God's judgment is not a wild, uncontrolled outburst of rage. It is precise, calculated, and thorough. He is the one who measured out the heavens with a span, and He is the one who will measure out the bread and water of judgment to His rebellious people.
The phrase "from time to time" indicates that this meager portion is not to be eaten at will. It is to be strictly rationed. Imagine the psychological torment. You cannot eat when you are hungry; you eat when the schedule permits. Every bite is freighted with the anxiety that there will be no more. God is stripping away every comfort, every simple pleasure, and replacing it with the constant, gnawing dread of famine. This is the fruit of covenant rebellion.
The Unspeakable Defilement (vv. 12-13)
If the recipe was desperate, the cooking instructions are utterly revolting.
"You shall eat it as a barley cake, having baked it in their sight over human dung." Then Yahweh said, "Thus will the sons of Israel eat their bread unclean among the nations where I will banish them." (Ezekiel 4:12-13 LSB)
We must understand the gravity of this command. According to the Mosaic Law, human excrement was profoundly unclean. It was to be taken outside the camp and buried, because the camp of Israel was holy to the Lord (Deuteronomy 23:12-14). To use it as fuel for cooking would be to deliberately defile the food, the cookware, and the person eating it. It was an unthinkable act for a priest like Ezekiel.
But God immediately provides the divine commentary. This is not gratuitous shock value. The physical act is a perfect picture of the spiritual reality. God says, "Thus will the sons of Israel eat their bread unclean among the nations." They had polluted the holy land with their idolatry, which was spiritual excrement in God's sight. They had treated His covenant as a profane thing. So, God's judgment will be to banish them to unclean lands, where they will be surrounded by Gentiles, unable to keep the dietary laws, cut off from the temple, and forced to live in a constant state of ceremonial defilement. The external state of exile will perfectly match their internal state of rebellion. They will be forced to eat, drink, and breathe their own uncleanness.
A Prophet's Plea, A God's Concession (vv. 14-15)
Ezekiel, the faithful servant, is horrified. His reaction is not one of rebellion, but of pious anguish.
"But I said, 'Ah, Lord Yahweh! Behold, I have never been defiled; for from my youth until now I have never eaten what died of itself or was torn by beasts, nor has any offensive meat ever entered my mouth.'" (Ezekiel 4:14 LSB)
Ezekiel's appeal is based on his lifelong commitment to holiness. As a priest, he has been meticulous in observing the laws of purity. This command strikes at the very core of his identity and his relationship with God. He is being asked to personally embody the very defilement he has spent his life avoiding. This is a severe test of his obedience, and his plea reveals a heart that genuinely desires to please God.
And God's response is remarkable. "Then He said to me, 'See, I will set for you cow's dung in place of human dung over which you will prepare your bread.'" This is not God backing down or admitting He was wrong. This is a profound display of grace within judgment. The symbol remains intact. Cow dung, while a common fuel for the poor, was still considered unclean for a priest preparing bread. The message of defilement is not erased. But God, in His mercy, spares His faithful servant the ultimate degradation. He makes a distinction between the righteous prophet and the wicked nation he represents. This small concession actually magnifies the horror of the original command and shows that even in the midst of fierce judgment, God knows how to show kindness to His own.
The Anatomy of Ruin (vv. 16-17)
Finally, God drops the symbolism and states the cold, hard reality of what is coming upon Jerusalem.
"Son of man, behold, I am going to break the staff of bread in Jerusalem... they will eat bread by weight and with anxiety, and they will drink water by measure and in desolation... and they will be in desolation with one another and rot away in their iniquity." (Ezekiel 4:16-17 LSB)
Bread is the "staff of life," the basic support for human existence. God says He is going to break that staff. The result will be famine, but it is more than just physical hunger. It is a complete societal collapse. The anxiety and desolation will be palpable. The social fabric will tear apart as people become desolate "with one another," isolated in their shared misery.
And the final phrase is the most terrifying of all: they will "rot away in their iniquity." The Hebrew word for "rot away" is used elsewhere for the decaying of flesh, for the putrefaction of a festering wound. This is what sin does. It is not just a series of bad choices; it is a spiritual gangrene. Left unchecked, it corrupts and consumes until the entire person, and the entire culture, simply rots from the inside out. This is the end of the road for covenant-breakers. It is not just punishment; it is the natural, inevitable consequence of turning away from the Fountain of Living Waters.
The Bread of Life
This entire, sordid affair is a portrait of our condition apart from Christ. We have all eaten unclean bread. We have all, in our sin, chosen defilement. We have chased after idols, loved the world, and in so doing, we have cooked our bread over the filth of our own rebellion. The sentence pronounced on Jerusalem, to "rot away in their iniquity," is the sentence that hangs over all of fallen humanity.
But the gospel is the story of a greater Prophet who did what Ezekiel was spared from doing. Jesus Christ, the eternally pure and undefiled Son of God, did not simply act out our defilement; He became it. For our sake, God "made him to be sin who knew no sin" (2 Corinthians 5:21). On the cross, He was force-fed the full, undiluted filth of our rebellion. He drank the cup of God's judgment down to the dregs. He was exiled outside the camp, bearing our reproach. He ate the bread of affliction and was overwhelmed by the waters of desolation.
The concession God gave Ezekiel is a faint shadow of the great substitution God accomplished in Christ. We deserved to eat the dung cakes of our own sin for eternity. We deserved to rot. But Christ took our place. He consumed our uncleanness so that we might be made clean. He endured the desolation so that we might be brought into fellowship. He starved so that we might be fed.
And because He did this, we are now invited to a different meal. We are invited to the Lord's Table. There we do not eat the bread of anxiety, but the bread of life. We do not drink the water of desolation, but the cup of the new covenant, sealed in His blood. The meal Ezekiel was forced to eat was a picture of judgment and defilement. The meal Christ invites us to is a feast of forgiveness and cleansing. So come, and welcome. Leave the dung cakes of your sin behind, and feast on the grace of God in Jesus Christ.