“Take your son, your only son… and go to the region of Moriah. Sacrifice him there as a burnt offering on a mountain I will show you.” (Gen 22:2) It’s one of the great ‘God said WHAT?’ passages, and yet we teach it to CHILDREN! But, the context makes all the difference. Child sacrifice was rife, and this story was written down a long time after the events, during the return from exile to a people who KNEW their God told them never to kill their children. They knew Isaac returns from the mountain alive all along, and they knew this was a story else entirely: a God who provides. (what they didn’t know is all the mind-blowing detail in which it foreshadows Jesus!)