History of the Old Covenant. By J. H. Kurtz [pp. 451-486]

]Kurtz on the Old Covenant.
this too, rightly, that the sacrifice of animals presented no ade quate atonement for offences, in which man's life was the forfeit. They felt, and rightly again, that nothing in the wide
world was too dear, nothing too precious, to give for regaining
the favour of God. And in their desperation they offer up a
human life as the costliest thing they knew, not heeding that
they are offering to God an unwilling and therefore valueless
victim, and a life which, itself sinful, cannot atone for sin, besides
bringing on themselves the guilt of murder. This was man's
solution, false and inhuman, as it was offensive to the Most
High, of that dread question which agitates every conscience,
How shall I be just with God? The true solution was not yet
given to the world. It should not be, until the time appointed
in the divine plan of saving mercy had arrived. Meanwhila it
should be intimated that such a solution would be given, though
for the present it was withheld. In the direction to offer Isaac
it was evidently implied that the dearest and the best must be
given unto God-that something more valuable than the life
of an animal is needed as an atonement for human guilt; while
in the staying Abraham's hand from giving the fatal stroke,
it was declared that Isaac was not the sacrifice which was
demanded; it was something more precious, something more
pure than that beloved child; what it should be was left for
God to reveal. And in the pointing out of the ram to be placed
upon the altar in the stead of Isaac, it was declared that until
the true sacrifice should appear, animal sacrifices, though in
themselves inoperative and insufficient to wash away sin, received
the divine sanction and would be admitted as prefiguring that
which was to come. The disclosing, therefore, as is here done,
of the imperfection that inhered in animal sacrifices, and that
there was nothing then adequate to take their place was equivalent to a pledge on the part of a gracious God, that there should
be a perfect- sacrifice provided and offered, and that its sovereign
efficacy should even then be reckoned unto those, who in faith
and pious fear offered up what was temporarily and until its
appearing admitted in its place. And now it is easy to see
why Abraham was directed to go to the mountains of Moriah
to offer up his son, where subsequently in the temple, were to
be offered those animal sacrifices, which here received a divine
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