This haftarah records the song David sings to God on the day he is delivered from all his enemies and specifically from Saul, opening by naming God as his rock, fortress and deliverer, the horn of his salvation and his refuge, before describing his own desperate distress, the waves of death surrounding him, met by God's dramatic intervention.
The song describes cosmic upheaval accompanying God's response, the earth shaking, smoke rising from His nostrils, fire from His mouth, God riding on a cherub and flying on the wings of the wind, imagery of overwhelming, world shaking power summoned specifically on David's behalf. David credits his own success in battle to God's training of his hands for war and his own preserved integrity, contrasting the humble people God saves with the haughty whom God brings low.
The haftarah closes with David praising God as his living rock, recounting nations subdued and made to serve him even those he did not previously know, and affirming that God shows loving kindness to His anointed, to David and to his descendants forever, closing an intensely personal song of deliverance with a promise extending well beyond David's own individual lifetime.
The song's imagery of God riding a cherub and flying on the wings of the wind is among the most vivid physical descriptions of divine motion found anywhere in the Hebrew Bible, treating God's intervention almost as a described event witnessed directly rather than only inferred from its results.