Abraham and Isaac. As told in the Holy Bible. This is my quick take on it. The black is information I have received. The colored parts are my thoughts regarding that information.

Thou shalt not kill.

If the intent to sin is in your heart you are already guilty of that sin.

God cannot tempt man to sin.

Do not test the Lord your God.

God told Abraham to sacrifice his son.

Abraham intended to carry out the sacrifice, but was stopped by an angel of God and provided with an alternative sacrificial ram.

What separates human sacrifice from murder? Is it that if God tells you to do it then it is not a sin to kill and it then is termed “sacrifice”, but otherwise it is a sin/ “murder”? Abraham intended to kill because God told him to. Does the intention automatically make him guilty of violating the 6^th commandment? Is it a thought-sin? Are those punished differently?

The Ten Commandments did not exist in Abraham’s time. So, would it be correct to say that God’s laws are flexible: one day killing, stealing, and raping are not written down as wrongs and are therefore not sin, but the next day there are stone tablets saying that you can’t do these things and now they are sin.

God was only testing Abraham’s faith.

God examines our hearts and our motives. Nothing we do or think ...is hidden from Almighty God.

If God knows us even before we are conceived, he has no need to conduct tests on us.

God did not want merely physical sacrifice, rather a sacrifice of the spirit. What is spirit and what does it mean to sacrifice it? That sounds ominous. Is spirit my mind/ personality/ ego?

Abraham somehow knew that God would keep His promise of creating a great nation from Abraham’s seed, Isaac. Even if he sacrificed Isaac, God would somehow make it work. If Abraham’s faith in God was complete, why did he lie to his servants and his son about what he was setting out to accomplish? It seemed that he was unsure and did not want others to understand what he was going to do. His traveling to Mt. Moriah instead of sacrificing Isaac in his own home may be due to the opposition he may have encountered from his servants and wife had he done the killing in their presence.

That Abraham obeyed God without thinking seems to be the virtue this story was meant to establish. To surrender your own judgment of what is right and what is wrong to a mysterious, infinite power you are not capable of understanding.