Thoughts on II Samuel 23:1-7

Thoughts on 2 Samuel 23:1-7 by Richard Ritenbaugh

"Now these are the last words of David.
Thus says David the son of Jesse;
Thus says the man raised up on high,
The anointed of the God of Jacob,
And the sweet psalmist of Israel: (2) "The Spirit of the LORD spoke by me,
And His word was on my tongue. (3) The God of Israel said,
The Rock of Israel spoke to me:
"He who rules over men must be just,
Ruling in the fear of God. (4) And he shall be like the light of the morning when the sun rises,
A morning without clouds,
Like the tender grass springing out of the earth,
By clear shining after rain." (5) " Although my house is not so with God,
Yet He has made with me an everlasting covenant,
Ordered in all things and secure.
For this is all my salvation and all my desire;
Will He not make it increase? (6) But the sons of rebellion shall all be as thorns thrust away,
Because they cannot be taken with hands. (7) But the man who touches them
Must be armed with iron and the shaft of a spear,
And they shall be utterly burned with fire in their place."

Because of his zeal for Him and His Kingdom, God used David mightily as a prophet to flesh out many of those promises in his writings, the Psalms. In his last words, David refers to the fact that God had inspired him: "The Spirit of the LORD spoke by me, and His word was on my tongue" (II Samuel 23:2).

We should not understand this to mean that God inspired him only in his last words but that the Holy Spirit was behind his entire contribution to the Old Testament, which was primarily the compositions we know as "psalms."

Even so, his last words have struck commentators down through the ages as unmistakably prophetic and specifically Messianic in tone.

Adam Clarke writes, "The words of this song contain a glorious prediction of Messiah's kingdom and conquests, in highly poetic language." Of II Samuel 23:1-7, the Keil and Delitzsch Commentary states:

[The chapter contains] the prophetic will and testament of the great king, unfolding the importance of his rule in relation to the sacred history of the future. . . . These "last words" contain the divine seal of all that he has sung and prophesied in several psalms concerning the eternal dominion of his seed, on the strength of the divine promise which he received through the prophet Nathan, that his throne should be established for ever. .

. . These words are not merely a lyrical expansion of that promise, but a prophetic declaration uttered by David at the close of his life and by divine inspiration, concerning the true King of the kingdom of God.

A substantial number of his psalms are clearly prophetic, even some of those that seem, on the surface, to describe his own feelings of despair and abandonment during the low periods of his life.

With just a slight shift in perspective, they can often be seen as describing Christ's struggles to master His own human nature and trust in God for deliverance. In fact, if we bring a prophetic eye to the reading of many of David's psalms, we can perceive their predictive nature.