The last two chapters of the Proverbs are remarkable as giving us the words of Agur, the son of Jakeh, in a prophecy; and thus fitly closing up the proverbial wisdom of Solomon to his son according to the flesh. Historically, God was in the end displeased with this wisest of men; and the king in Jerusalem, the glory of whose person and throne had won the heart of the Queen of Sheba, became an idolator. Solomon was turned aside by “the strange woman,” against whom he had warned his son Rehoboam; and Rehoboam was led away by false counselors, notwithstanding the proverbs of his father. A wise king, a righteous throne, and a prosperous nation governed in the fear of the Lord, in which all true greatness consists, was not found in Solomon’s successor. Rehoboam forsook the counsel of the old men, and answered the people after the advice of the young men, saying— “My father made your yoke heavy, but I will add thereto; my father chastised you with whips, but I will chastise you with scorpions.”
Agur (a stranger), the son of Jakeh, who is ungenealogized —without father and without mother so to speak—gathers together the words of this chapter, and, like Elihu to Job, takes the place of God. As Melchisedec displaced Abraham, so that the less was blessed of the better, so this unknown Agur utters his prophecy, and in this sense supersedes Solomon and the Proverbs. This stranger (Agur) spake unto Ithiel (or God with me), even unto Ithiel, and Ucal (or the Mighty One—God for me), and these two persons, with their respective names and characters, as they pass out of prophecy and the book of Proverbs, become to us in New Testament revelation none other than Jesus—Immanuel, or the Saviour—Ithiel; while God for us, or the Ucal—the Mighty One—who can be against us? —takes this place after the death and resurrection of Christ as His lamb and our substitute.
The incarnation of Jesus introduced our mystery, the Ithiel, or God manifest in the flesh, and His resurrection from the dead made the Mighty God known as the Ucal, or God for us, against all that was against us, consummated by the mighty power which He wrought in Christ, the ascended. One, now sitting on the right hand of the Majesty in the heavens.
This Agur (the stranger), son of Jakeh, at once takes the place of nothingness in the presence of this twofold acknowledgment of Christ and of God, the Ithiel and the Ucal. “Surely I am more brutish than any man, and have not the understanding of a man; I neither learned wisdom nor have the knowledge of the holy.” He that knows his own heart knows more evil of himself than of any other, and this is only found out in secret, when in the presence of God, like the man Agur, “who spake unto Ithiel, even unto Ithiel and Ucal.”
The natural mind at its greatest elevation perceiveth not, neither understandeth who and what God is, in His holiness and majesty. “Who hath ascended up into heaven, or descended who hath gathered the wind in his fists? who hath bound the waters in a garment? who hath established all the ends of the earth?” asks this stranger, the son of Jakeh. Nor, can His works reveal His Person, though they may and do declare the Almighty; but “What is his name, and what is his son’s name, if thou canst tell?” remains unanswered. In this way the man Agur challenges all around him to make this God known by ascending up to heaven, or by descending to the lower parts of the earth. But these are the steps which the real Ithiel (the Word made flesh) could alone walk in, to make God known to us— “the only-begotten Son, which is in the bosom of the Father, he hath declared him”—first, by incarnation, as born of the Virgin, and then by revelation in the Scriptures, that make His glories known. “Now that he ascended, what is it but that he also descended first into the lower parts of the earth? He that descended is the same also that ascended up far above all heavens, that he might fill all things.” He accepted the body prepared for Him, that He might assume the nature of man, and do the work upon the cross, by which He glorified God, and redeemed and saved the ruined and the undone. “We beheld his glory, the glory as of an only-begotten of the Father, full of grace and truth.”
Come down from heaven in the mysterious union of God and man, He has gone up again to unite in His Person the earth and the heavens. He sits on the throne, in the center of principalities and powers, as the Son of Man, crowned with glory and honor—into whose hands the Father hath given all things—that all men should honor the Son as they honor the Father.
Ucal, the man Agur, who spake in prophecy unto Ithiel and must needs have the anointed ear to hear of the new and hidden wisdom of Solomon’s greater son—the true and divine source of life and light. This stranger (the son of Jakeh), who demanded “What is his name, and what is his son’s name, if thou canst tell?” must in spirit sit at the feet of Jesus—Ithiel—to hear the descended One from heaven say, “I thank thee, O Father, Lord of heaven and earth, that thou halt hid these things from the wise and prudent, and hast revealed them unto babes. Even so, Father, for so it seemed good in thy sight.” And again, “No man knoweth who the Son is but the Father, and who the Father is but the Son, and he to whom the Son will reveal him.”
Our Ithiel—Jesus, when on earth, in the midst of His Agur disciples, and before the gift of the Holy Ghost, had also His own proverbs and prophecies, as, for example, in John 16, “These things have I spoken to you in proverbs, but the time cometh when I shall no more speak unto you in proverbs, but I shall show you plainly of the Father.” Nor was it till, as the descended One, and the ascending One, He said to them, “I came forth from the Father, and am come into the world; and again, I leave the world, and go to the Father,” that the disciples said unto Him, “Lo! now speaketh thou plainly, and speaketh no proverb.” He had spoken to them also in parables; but the time was then come for the true Ithiel, and the one living and true Ucal, to pass out of parables and proverbs; so that in the full disclosure of the Father’s name, and the Son’s name, the disciples said, “Now arc we sure that thou knowest all things, and needest not that any man should ask thee; by this we believe that thou earnest forth from God.” On their part, too, they drop the proverbs and parables, which concealed the Father and the Son’s names, and tarry in Jerusalem for the descent of the Holy Ghost from heaven, under whose anointing they passed into the higher mysteries which mark our present fellowship in the light where God dwells with the Father and the Son
This Agur, who had no understanding, and was in his own eyes more brutish than any one, yea, Who had neither wisdom nor knowledge when he viewed himself in the presence of the Creator God, turns from all else to the revelation that makes Him known by the Holy Spirit, and says, “Every word of God is pure: he is a shield unto them that put their trust in him. Add thou not unto his words, lest he reprove thee, and thou be found a liar.”
Thus the word of God, and its authority over us, comes into its proper place after the declaration of the Father’s name and the Son’s name have been made known and accepted. Then. follows the true acknowledgment by Agur of dependence, and yet the fullest confidence uttered in the prayer, “Two things have I required of thee; deny me them not before I die. Remove far from me vanity and lies; give me neither poverty nor riches; feed me with food convenient for me, lest I be full and deny thee, and say, Who is the Lord or lest I be poor, and steal, and take the name of my God in vain.” In these desires we find another proof that the stranger, Agur, is a man of different mold from Solomon, and the power, wealth, and glory that were given to him; and thus his sayings become a sort of moral to the book of Proverbs.
He will not accuse even a servant to his master. And passing from what is merely individual to take a bird’s-eye view of the races of men under the sun, he classes them into four generations, which remain unchanged. 1. There is “a generation that curseth their father, and doth not bless their mother.” A generation that is not true to their natural relations; for, as we find in 2nd Timothy, “Men shall be lovers of their own selves; disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy.” 2. There is “a generation that are pure in their own eyes, and yet is not washed from their filthiness;” and this is but an early sketch of those in these last perilous times, who have “a form of godliness, but deny the power thereof.” 3. There is “a generation, O how lofty are their eyes, and their eyelids are lifted up.” And so Paul wrote to his son in the faith, of some who were. “proud... heady, high-minded, lovers of pleasures more than lovers of God.” 4. There is “a generation whose teeth are as swords, and their jaw teeth as knives, to devour the poor from off the earth, and the needy from among men.” Paul speaks of a similar generation, and directs Titus to put them in mind, “to speak evil of no man, to be no brawlers, but gentle, showing all meekness to all men;” for some were living in malice, hateful, and hating one another.
After these four classifications of the human race comes the horse-leech, which hath two daughters, crying, “Give, give,” who are as truly a power in this present age, and as familiar to the instructed heart, as is the right hand and its cunning to every individual in it. This horse-leech, by its own habits of ferocious cruelty to the animal on which it fastens, and by its greediness for the life-blood which it draws out, presents to, us in figure “the murderer from the beginning,” who, in his untiring enmity, walks up and down through the earth, seeking whom he may devour. The two daughters are plainly enough discerned in the midst of these four generations of men, by the selfishness and covetousness that mark their ways while living in this present world; and, afterward, by hell and destruction, which are never full, and are impatient to swallow up the generations of the wicked.
Beyond these two daughters lie three things that are never satisfied, yea, four, that say not, “It is enough;” and these, though in their nature clamorously receptive, are alike non-productive—the grave, which swallows all up; the barren womb, which gives birth to nothing; the earth, that is not filled with water; and the devouring fire, which consumes whatever it can reach. It is the blessing of God that alone maketh rich, and where this is not, there can be neither safety nor increase, life nor continuance; so that man becomes a prey, in his turn, to the disappointments which spring up from within him, or to the encroaching powers that surround him.
Nothing can extricate the soul from what it discovers itself to be, or from what gapes upon it with open mouth, crying, “Give, give,” and which knows not how to say “It is enough,” but its complete deliverance by the Ithiel and this Ucal, with whom the son of Jakeh spoke. In other words, where Christ and the Saviour and the God of all grace are known and rested in by the teaching of the Holy Ghost, the believer can look round on all these gaunt and giant powers that would else swallow him up and eternally separate him from God, and challenge them all by this Ucal, or God for us, and say, Who can be against us? “Who shall lay anything to the charge of God’s elect? It is God that justifieth, who is he that condemneth? It is Christ that died, yea, rather, that is risen again, who is even at the right hand of God, who also maketh intercession for us.”
These were some of the lessons which Agur, the man who spoke unto Ithiel and Ucal, learned by proverbs, in his day; and which the man of God, in these last perilous times, is taught by the Spirit and the Word of God to see personified in these closing scenes of this dark world’s history, before the coming of the Lord, and the casting of Satan into the bottomless pit, with the horse-leech and his daughters, and the generations of the wicked.
In conclusion, we may observe, as regards these two last chapters of this wonderful book, that they introduce to us the man and the woman of old in new forms, The Agur of chapter 30, and the virtuous woman of chapter 31, whose price is “far above rubies,” and in whom “the heart of her husband doth safely trust,” are more familiar to our minds when they pass out of the obscurity of a proverb, and its mystic language, into the Song of Songs which is Solomon’s, where they are recognized as the bridegroom and the bride in the intimacies of living thoughts and loving affections, which all can understand. The Adam and Eve of Eden, or the first man and the first woman, have given place to this Agur or stranger in this world, and the virtuous woman, who “will do him good, and not evil, all the days of her life.”
In the Song of Solomon these are seen in “a fountain of gardens, a well of living waters, and streams from Lebanon. Awake, O north wind, and come thou south; blow upon my garden, that the spices thereof may flow out. Let my beloved come into his garden, and eat his pleasant fruits. Until the day break, and the shadows flee away, I will get me to the mountain of myrrh, and to the hill of frankincense. Thou art all fair, my love, there is no spot in thee.”
We, whose happy lot it is to be waiting for the Lord’s coming and the day of His espousals, and this marriage of the Lamb, can see how these bridal celebrations have but cast their shadows before them, whether in the Canticles, or, as in Proverbs, where the illustrious, though hidden stranger Agur, came to seek the virtuous woman, “whose candle goeth not out by night.”
The unveiled mystery in the Ephesians gives us, in complete revelation, the chaste virgin espoused to one husband, or the Eve that is being formed, passing out of type and figure, Proverbs or Canticles, into the living reality of Christ, as the Head of the Church, and the Saviour of the body.
The Lord give us entire satisfaction and rest of heart, in the known revelation in which His love has set us, till the glory and the nuptial day shall make manifest that Christ “loved the church, and gave himself for it; that he might sanctify and cleanse it with the washing of water, by the word that he might present it to himself a glorious church, not having spot or wrinkle, or any such thing; but that it should be holy, and without blemish.” B.
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