http://theologyforwomen.blogspot.com/2009/11/heart-of-her-husband-safely-trusts-in.html
Proverbs 1:6
For understanding proverbs and parables, the words of the wise and their riddles.
Most of my life I have been presented with the book of Proverbs as practical wisdom for daily life. Proverbs has been like one of the books of the Law after the Mosaic Law. A long closing section like Proverbs 31 presents us, we have often been told, with the good wife, the ideal wife. At the risk of overstating things in terms of what I have heard men say, the Proverbs 31 woman is the ideal to shoot for but not an actual woman. Interestingly, the Proverbs 7 woman is considered all too real. One person who said Proverbs 31's woman is an ideal to shoot for who doesn't exist also said, "All women are whores, spiritually speaking." Uh ... problem.
The best way I can articulate the problem, as I perceive it, is that the broader literary context of the discourse on the excellent wife is the advice a mother gives to her son who is going to become a king. She has implored him earlier to not give his strength to women, to those who destroy kings. Obviously a contrast between two women throughout, wisdom and folly, has been a kind of meta-theme in each of the sections of Proverbs. We are introduced to wisdom personified in the first eight chapters and at the end, if you will, we are reintroduced to her through the good wife who Lemuel's mother would consider fit for a king.
Now I'm aware that certain Christians and pastors dislike the idea of seeing allegories in the Old Testament where there is no concrete evidence, but I also see that Christ Himself said that the scriptures point to Him to those who refused to accept him. For as often as I have heard people talk about how husbands are like Jesus and the wife is like the Church I have not stumbled across a whole lot of reflection on how the Proverbs 31 woman, typologically, can indicate what we should be able to say about the Church, since she shall be the bride of the King of Kings. Ihe Law of Moses was binding not only on the nation of Israel but on the individuals thereof, and in a similar way Proverbs can be received not just as axioms regarding the lives of individuals but outlines the causes and considerations of God's people.
But I want to direct attention to Proverbs 1:6 because it reveals that the book is useful not simply for making the simple wise and making the wise wiser but reveals that it will be a helpful aid in understanding proverbs and parables (epigrams), the words of the wise ... and their riddles.
For the years I have had Proverbs presented to me as a rulebook for practical wisdom I often benefited from it but there is another level at which it works, a level of riddles. Consider the Preacher in Ecclesiastes who, in addition to being wise, arranged and compiled many sayings. A way of observing Koholeth's methodology in Ecclesiastes is to see how he weighs one proverb against another and finds the limits of each, and even finds the proverbs wanting. Why, then, have I been so very wise? Does not the wise man die like the fool? Do not both meet the same fate? Do not be overly righteous and do not be overly wise, why die before your time? Do not be wicked and do not be a fool. Why should God strike you down? It is good to hold on to one and not let go of the other for the godly man avoids all extremes.
You see? The Preacher grasped that an unyielding application of proverbs as rules to live by is foolish because the proverbs are not necessarily rules about how to ensure a great life but riddles through which we can understand ourselves and understand that life is mysterious. When you read Proverbs consider the comparisons and contrasts between three types of people, the wise person, the fool, and the person who considers himself wise.
Of the three the person who thinks he is wise is worst off and is the most foolish and, ultimately, doomed. Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him! At the end of Proverbs , for instance, we get Agur, who says he is a fool and does not know the Lord. When Agur asks "Who has ascended and come down?"; when he asks, "Who has wrapped the waters in his garment; and finally asks "What is his son's name?" we are reading the words of a man who says he does not know the Lord. Yet immediately he proceeds to say every word of the Lord is pure.
Now it is helpful to consider that in ancient times it was commonly accepted that kings have divine or divinely sanctioned births. The messiah meant "annointed one" and it was not unheard of to consider the king a son of god. As Christ put it, if those who received the word of God were called gods ... . Before long Agur has presented us with a litany of riddles, of things too marvelous for him to understand, of things that are small but wise, of things under which the weight of things as they become shaken. The end of Proverbs leads us back to the beginning, and we are at the end invited to consider riddles.
I have noticed that among pastors and teachers I have heard in my life people spend plenty of time on the chapters up through the later twenties and, of course, that Proverbs 31 woman ... but no one teaches so much on Proverbs 30. I once observed that Agur said there were three things too mysterious for him, four too wonderful to understand--an eagle in flight, a snake moving along a rock, a ship on the sea, and a how a man has his way with a woman. When I used to observe, with great irritation, the condescension of married people or dating people talking about how "it's all much simpler than you people are making it out to be" I mentioned this proverb. One person said I could be taking that passage out of context. Ha ha, at 0 degrees Celsius.
See, for as long as I have heard Proverbs and read Proverbs as a rule book it seems absurd, impossible. Yes, fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom and there is a great deal of practical wisdom to be gained from the proverbs. Yet more and more I am struck by the riddle aspect of the wisdom literature, especially when you take it as a whole and not as atomized parts. Don't just read Proverbs, read Proverbs with Ecclesiastes and with Job and with Song of Songs. You will begin to see that as a literary whole the Writings reveal the riddles of the human condition.
Why DOES the fool have money in his hand to buy wisdom when he doesn't really want it? Why DOES the fool care only to vent his own opinion rather than consider the counsel of others? Why does the fool isolate himself to pursue his own desires and rage against all sound wisdom? Why do people forsake their friends and the friends of their fathers to go get help in some faraway land? If the glory of old men is grandchildren why do some grandparents consider their grandchildren to be unruly brutes? If the glory of a child is his father why do so many men in evangelicalism lament the lack of fathers in our time and consider their fathers to be a dubious glory at best?
Proverbs that on their face look like simple declarative statements have within them the element of the riddle. If God does not let the righteous go hungry but denies the wicked what they crave what does this mean, especially in light of Ecclesiastes' lament that the wickeed often prosper, or the lament of the psalmists about the prosperity of the wicked?
Read each proverb as a riddle and not a rule and you will begin to understand how much wisdom there is in them. The answer to the riddle may not be an answer that vindicates you or your friends or your parents or anyone you love but if you read it with regard for the Lord it will be an answer that helps you understand Him and yourself better. By the time you get to Agur at the end of the book and have read "Do you see a man wise in his own eyes? There is more hope for a fool than for him?" you will see that for Agur to say he is a fool who has not attained wisdom and does not know the way of the Lord has an irony to it, because he desires to neither be so rich as to forget the Lord nor so poor as to become a criminal who defames the holy name. Just as there are fools who appear to be wise for as long as they keep their mouths shut there are wise people who appear to be fools because they do not trust in their own wisdom.
I spent years reading Proverbs as a rule book, a supplemental law to other moral teaching in the scriptures. I was advised to read it in this way and I regret that for so long I accepted that advice at face value. I regret that most teaching I heard about the proverbs treated it in that way and did not see the book as truly being full of riddles that God providentially gave us to meditate on to consider the riddles that are within ourselves. If the heart is deceitful above all things and beyond our own understanding then what role do riddles play? Can they not be used by the Lord as clarifying agents to reveal the answer to the riddles in my own heart?
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