2 Samuel 21:16-17 – The Lamp of Israel
In these verses, David is both like and unlike the Lord Jesus Christ. He’s like the Lord Jesus in that the nation’s hopes are completely bound up with him. After Ishbi-benob nearly kills David, his men say to him: ‘You shall no longer go out with us to battle, lest you quench the lamp of Israel.’ To talk about David as the lamp of Israel isn’t just a nice flowery thing to say. It’s actually a true description of his role and his importance. To talk about a nation’s lamp being quenched is to talk about them being snuffed out – to cease to exist. In a way that had almost been what was at stake when David fought Goliath, before he was even king. Goliath had said that whoever won the contest, their nation would serve the other person’s nation. Whether David beat Goliath or not didn’t just mean success or failure for him as an individual, but for the nation. That’s even more the case now that David is king, and that God had made a covenant with him. For David himself, any resemblance he had to a lamp was simply in reflecting the light of God. If you look at chapter 22 verse 29, David will say: ‘For you are my lamp, O LORD’. Or in Psalm 18, which we sing as ‘The Lord will light my candle so’. David says: ‘For it is you who light my lamp’. So yes David is a lamp. But his light is a reflected light. As is ours.
This language of the king being a lamp to the people is carried on in the kings that follow David. For example 1st Kings 15:4: ‘Nevertheless, for David’s sake the LORD his God gave him a lamp in Jerusalem, setting up his son after him, and establishing Jerusalem’. The pictures is used as a description of the Messiah himself in Psalm 132:17. Jesus of course described himself as the light of the world. And we’re told in Revelation 22:5 that in heaven we will need no light of lamp or sun, for the Lord God will be our light. And so to call David the lamp of Israel points us forward to the true and better David, the light of the world, Jesus Christ.
Question
- Whose light did David reflect?
- What did Jesus call Himself?
Prayer Points
- Pray that we would reflect the light of Christ.
- Use prayer points from your congregation.
- Pray for family matters.