What Does II Samuel 18:33 Mean?

The chapter culminates in the most heart-wrenching lament in the Old Testament: "And the king was much moved, and went up to the chamber over the gate, and wept: and as he went, thus he said, O my son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! would God I had died for thee, O Absalom, my son, my son!" The five-fold repetition of "my son" is the language of a father whose grief has overwhelmed every other identity, king, commander, judge. David is no longer the monarch who needed the rebellion to be crushed; he is the father who would have traded his life for his child's.

The cry "would God I had died for thee" is the deepest expression of substitutionary love in the Old Testament. David wishes he could have taken Absalom's place, absorbing the death that fell upon his son and restoring the child who was destroyed by the rebellion David's own sins had set in motion. The wish is impossible, which is what makes it so agonizing: no human father can die in his child's place, no human love can reverse the consequences that God's justice has decreed, and the gap between the father's desire and the father's ability is the space in which grief lives.

But what David wished and could not do, God the Father accomplished in Christ. The cry "would God I had died for thee" finds its answer in the gospel, where the Father did not die for the Son but sent the Son to die for the world. "For God so loved the world, that he gave his only begotten Son, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have everlasting life." The substitutionary love that David could only wish for became, in Christ, the substitutionary death that actually saves, and the lament of the earthly father over the gate of Mahanaim is answered by the triumph of the heavenly Father over the empty tomb of Easter morning.