The House of Bread

A couple of years ago, Annette and I had the wonderful opportunity to spend a week with friends in the south of France.

As you might imagine, I had looked forward to enjoying some great French cooking while we were there, and I was not disappointed.

Within just a couple of hours after we had landed in Paris, we were seated together at a little table on the sidewalk outside of a cafe, where Annette got to check something off her bucket list when our waiter brought out a plate of escargot.

During that week, we had the opportunity to enjoy dainty French pastries and desserts, savory entrees, fresh produce from the farms of the fertile Provence region of southern France, a variety of cheeses that would make your head spin, and sausages and other smoked meats that were so delicious I wanted to bring them back home with me.

I had fully expected we would encounter some wines and cheeses in France that would put to shame anything we had experienced here in America, but what I did NOT expect was the quality of the bread we enjoyed while we were there.

The little town where our friends had rented a house for the week had a bakery that was about a three-minute walk from our house, so each day started with someone walking over and picking up fresh croissants and baguettes and bringing them back to leave on the kitchen counter for everyone to enjoy whenever they wanted.

People in New York like to talk about how their pizza is the best in the world, and they say that it’s because the dough is made with New York water. I wonder if something like that must be going on in France, because I’ll tell you that there is something different and special about the bread we had there, maybe even more than the cheeses or the wine.

Did you know that they even have special bread laws in France? Every village in France must sell bread. If there’s no bakery, you’ll find a post office or a store or even a van with a sign that reads “dépôt de pain,” to let people know that’s where they can buy bread that has been made somewhere else and brought into town for sale.

“In 1993, the French government passed a new law called the Décret Pain. The law states that traditional baguettes have to be made on the premises where they’re sold and can only be made with four ingredients: wheat flour, water, salt and yeast. They can’t be frozen at any stage or contain additives or preservatives – which also means they go stale within 24 hours.” [https://www.renestance.com/blog/la-baguette-central-to-french-life/]

Clearly, bread is very important to the French, but the fact is that bread has been very important to every culture that has ever existed.

The Swiss have a proverb: Avoid those who don’t like bread and children. There is a Russian proverb: With a piece of bread in your hand, you’ll find paradise under a pine tree.

Even our language is influenced by the importance of bread to daily life. Take the word “companion.” Webster defines “companion” as a person or thing that accompanies another. But it originated from a pair of Latin words, “com” for together with, and “panis” for bread. From those Latin words came the Old French word “compaignon,” which literally means one who breaks bread with another.

Depending on which translation you are using, the word “bread” appears as many as 281 times in the Old Testament and 83 times in the New Testament.

There are seven Hebrew words for bread, and because bread was the basic staple of meals during ancient times, translators sometimes have used the words “meal” or “food” instead of the literal translation.

So, for instance, in Genesis, chapter 37, when Joseph’s brothers had thrown him into a pit prior to selling him to Ishmaelite traders who would then take him to Egypt, the New American Standard Bible says, “Then they sat down to eat a meal.”

Maybe they sat down to eat bread. Or maybe they sat down to eat a meal that consisted primarily of bread. That’s the kind of thing translators grapple with when they’re looking at the Hebrew manuscripts of Old Testament books.

But, regardless of the translation difficulties, it is clear that bread plays a significant role in God’s word.

Let me give you another example.

Micah 5:2 NASB95

“But as for you, Bethlehem Ephrathah, Too little to be among the clans of Judah, From you One will go forth for Me to be ruler in Israel. His goings forth are from long ago, From the days of eternity.”

Now, I hope you’ll recognize this as one of the Old Testament prophecies about the birth of Jesus. Indeed, this is the prophecy the chief priests and scribes quoted to Herod when the wise men came looking for the one who had been born King of the Jews.

There were two towns called Bethlehem in Palestine at this time, and the one in Judea was called Bethlehem Ephrathah to distinguish it from the other one. Earlier in its history, it had been known as Ephrath, and it was the place where Jacob had buried his wife, Rachel.

But I gave you this verse from the prophet Micah as an example of the importance of bread in the Old Testament. So where’s the bread?

Well, it’s right there in the name of that little town, Bethlehem, which in the Hebrew is pronounced bayth leh·khem.

That’s a compound word, and the second word, lehem, is one of those seven Hebrew words for bread that I talked about earlier. And bayth means “house.” So bayth leh·khem, then, means House of Bread.

Now, I imagine that when Micah wrote this verse under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, the fact that the Messiah would be born in a town whose name means “House of Bread” didn’t seem very significant to him.

And it probably didn’t mean much to the wise men or to the priests and scribes standing before Herod, either. Maybe it didn’t mean much to the disciples or to anybody else who was connected to Jesus during His ministry, either.

But the Apostle John, in chapter 6 of his Gospel, records that one day, Jesus was talking to the crowds that had followed Him to Capernaum.

The previous day, he had performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes, when five barley loaves and two fishes were more than enough for the five thousand or more who were gathered there to eat their fill.

He had left the crowds that day and later joined His disciples on their boat on the Sea of Galilee, and they had gone to Capernaum. But the crowd had followed them there the next morning, and they were looking for another miraculous feeding.

John 6:26–27 NASB95

Jesus answered them and said, “Truly, truly, I say to you, you seek Me, not because you saw signs, but because you ate of the loaves and were filled. “Do not work for the food which perishes, but for the food which endures to eternal life, which the Son of Man will give to you, for on Him the Father, God, has set His seal.”

Now, there follows an exchange in which the people ask what they can do to work the works of God, and Jesus replies that the work of God is “that you believe in Him who He has sent.”

The people wanted to know what sorts of works they could do to gain eternal life. But Jesus was telling them that there are no such works.

He didn’t put it this way, but we might recognize His response as part of that creed we so often recite: We are saved by grace alone, through faith alone, in Christ alone.

Now, the people had been taught by their religious leaders that by keeping the Mosaic Law — refraining from the things that were prohibited to them and doing the things that were commanded of them — they would be good enough to stand before God as citizens of His kingdom.

But Jesus here has essentially said that there’s nothing we can do to be good enough to become citizens of the Kingdom of God. Our only way into heaven is by faith in Him who was sent, faith in Jesus.

And so, the people at Capernaum demanded some kind of sign that would confirm that Jesus had the authority to overrule their religious leaders. I suppose they had forgotten the loaves and fishes from the day before.

And then they reminded Jesus of the sign of the manna — the bread of heaven — that their forefathers had eaten in the wilderness.

And so, picking up again in verse 32:

John 6:32–34 NASB95

Jesus then said to them, “Truly, truly, I say to you, it is not Moses who has given you the bread out of heaven, but it is My Father who gives you the true bread out of heaven. “For the bread of God is that which comes down out of heaven, and gives life to the world.” Then they said to Him, “Lord, always give us this bread.”

Here we are, talking about bread again, but Jesus is about to add a whole new dimension to our understanding of it. Look at verse 35.

John 6:35 NASB95

Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life; he who comes to Me will not hunger, and he who believes in Me will never thirst.

“I am the bread of life.”

When His disciples heard Jesus say this, I wonder if they suddenly remembered that He had been born in bayth leh·khem, the House of Bread, or if that realization only came later.

I can imagine Matthew writing his Gospel and getting to the part where the chief priests and scribes were reciting the prophecy of Micah. And I wonder if the significance of this meaning of the name of that town only became clear to him as he wrote the very word “Bethlehem.”

It seems only fitting that He who is the Bread of Life would have been born in the House of Bread.

But what did Jesus mean by calling Himself the Bread of Life?

Well, the people of this time could not live without bread; it ws the main staple of their daily diet. Bread was the main thing they ate, and without it they would not survive.

Similarly, without Jesus, we cannot have eternal life — everlasting life in the presence of and in fellowship with the Father and the Son, the way it was always intended to be.

In another of the great “I AM” statements of Jesus recorded by the Apostle John, Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father by by Me.”

There was nothing in the diet of first-century Judea that could substitute for bread, and without it, people would die.

And when it comes to eternal life, there is nothing that can substitute for faith in Jesus. No amount of good works, no amount of self-righteousness will enable we sinners to stand before a perfect and holy God.

The only way we will be able to stand before a perfect and holy God is if we are clothed in the righteousness of Christ Himself by virtue of having placed our faith in Him and His sacrificial death on our behalf at the cross.

So, yes, Jesus certainly meant here that only through Him can we have life.

But I think there’s more going on here. Too many of us seem to be content with having received the Bread of Life when we were saved.

We are glad we will go to heaven, and we’re thankful for the sacrifice that Jesus made to pay the penalty for our sins, but I think we sometimes forget that Jesus also talked about our daily bread.

Just as the people of first-century Judea needed bread every day, we Christians need a continuing relationship with Jesus to thrive.

Your salvation is a once-and-done thing, but your sanctification and your relationship with your savior need a commitment to pursuing Jesus every single day.

I talked on Friday night about the fact that we were created for fellowship with God and how the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus have made that possible for us.

But too many of us Christians go through our lives as if the only fellowship with God that matters is that which will take place after we have died and gone to heaven.

Jesus said that he had come to give life and life abundantly. That kind of abundant life is available to you right now if you are a follower of Christ. You don’t have to wait for heaven.

But it’s only available to the extent that you pursue it. It’s only available to the extent that you look to Jesus as your daily bread, the spiritual bread that will sustain you through your troubles here on earth and give you the energy to do the work that God has planned for you here.

We need to remember that without Jesus, we can do nothing. And we need to be seeking Him in prayer and in the reading of His word every day.

That’s one of the things I love about the fact that we take part in the Lord’s Supper each month here at Liberty Spring. It’s a reminder that we need this bread of life — this Jesus — as a regular part of our spiritual diet.

And so, today, as we join together in this communion service, as we are companions breaking bread together in the Old French sense of the word, I want to challenge you to commit yourself to the Lord to be people who seek the bread of life every day, people who understand that we need Jesus not just for eternal life but for abundant life in the here and now.

We’re going to do the Lord’s Supper a little differently today. I’m going to ask one of the deacons to come down and hold the loaf of bread while you come to the altar, row by row, to have a piece torn off for you. You can get the juice from another of the deacons. Then, each of you can go back to your seats, and we’ll continue with this ceremonial meal.

If you are a baptized believer — if you have placed all of your trust for salvation entirely in Jesus and His finished work at the cross — I want to invite you to join us this morning as we participate in the Lord’s Supper.

Jesus commanded that we observe the Lord’s Supper as an act of obedience to Him and as a way of proclaiming that we who follow Him in faith belong to Him.

The Lord’s Supper is a reminder to Christians that we are still in a time of advent, that we still await the fullness of God’s promise of salvation, a promise that will be made complete when Jesus returns and believers are either raised from the dead or have their bodies transformed as they rise to meet Him in the clouds behind the resurrected believers.

Just as baptism reminds us that we are buried with Christ in the likeness of His death and raised with Him in the likeness of His resurrection, the Lord’s Supper reminds us that our hope for salvation rests entirely on the sacrifice that Jesus made on our behalf at the cross. It reminds us that He is the bread of life.

And our frequent observation of this ordinance of the church expresses both the eagerness we have for His return and the patience we have as God continues to extend His grace to the lost world.

Now, this sacred meal that dates all the way back to when Jesus shared it with His disciples at the Last Supper on the night before He was crucified.

The conditions during the Last Supper were different than the conditions we have here today, but the significance was the same as it is today.

Jesus told His disciples that the bread represented His body, which would be broken for our transgressions.

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:26 NASB95

While they were eating, Jesus took some bread, and after a blessing, He broke it and gave it to the disciples, and said, “Take, eat; this is My body.”

As Jesus suffered and died on that cross, his blood poured out with His life. This was always God’s plan to reconcile mankind to Himself.

“In [Jesus] we have redemption through His blood, the forgiveness of our trespasses, according to the riches of His grace which He lavished on us.”

Let us pray.

Matthew 26:27–28 NASB95

And when He had taken a cup and given thanks, He gave it to them, saying, “Drink from it, all of you; for this is My blood of the covenant, which is poured out for many for forgiveness of sins.

Take and drink.

“Now, as often as we eat this bread and drink the cup, we proclaim the Lord’s death until He comes.”

Maranatha! Lord, come!

Here at Liberty Spring, we have a tradition following our commemoration of the Lord’s Supper.

Please gather around in a circle, and let us sing together “Blest Be the Tie that Binds.”