The small group that my wife and I attended for a while had decided to work through a study of the book of Isaiah. So far so good. They found a study guide based on the ESV translation and we started into it, and it all seemed well and fine only to discover that it totally skipped over the part where Isaiah walks around naked and barefoot for three years. (Isaiah 20:2-4)
I don’t understand how that’s possible. One of the great prophets of scripture walked around naked or partially naked for three years and we’re just glossing right over it? As a quick side note, I’m a little suspicious of interpretations that make it seem like Isaiah perhaps isn’t really naked or all that close to it since God makes a direct comparison in verse four saying “As Isaiah has walked … so shall the king of Assyria lead the Egyptian captives and the Cushite exiles … with buttocks uncovered.”
Anyway, I wonder if part of the reason it irked me was because it seemed like a microcosm of the tendency that can exist (at least within evangelicalism) to gloss over the weird parts of the bible. That’s a bad tendency because there are a lot of weird parts. And that would mean glossing over quite a bit of the bible. That’s a conversation that probably deserves its own post so I’ll leave it at that.
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