God meets us where we are, and I think that in reading accounts of God's prior interactions with culture, modern audiences should be careful to discern which parts are part of the culture itself, and which parts are the ways that God made it different. Like, if Jesus came today, he would wear sneakers and use the internet and tell parables about reality show contestants and illegal immigrants, but those things wouldn't be sacred in and of themselves, nor would they be perfect models of the way God actually is (i.e., he would tell a parable about "The kingdom of heaven is like unto someone who was on Survivor and got an immunity idol, etc." and then in the year 4000 someone's reading that passage from the Gospel of Katie and starts doing research on Survivor and finds out that there's a comet that has the same name as the winner on the last season of Survivor before it was cancelled).
Or, as another example, in the sacrificing Isaac incident, the important part isn't that God told Abraham to kill his son -- all the gods at the time would eventually demand that. The thing to take away is where God broke into a routine cultural event and said "No. I'm not like other gods. Look over there.", and for the first time anyone in that time could remember, there was a god who provided rather than demanded.