The flood did not do away with sin. Man is still sinful from his youth (Genesis 8:21). And even the descendants of righteous Noah rebel against God and set up a tower in Babel to make a name for themselves rather than for God. God stops their project by confusing their languages and spreading them across the earth, contrary to their will but in line with God's.
God then calls a man named Abram, later called Abraham. God calls Abraham to wander through a land he did not know, and He delivers him from potential disasters.
Abraham is a model of Christian faith, the faith that justifies, because he trusted in God's promise without reservation. Abraham trusted God's word rather than empirical evidence. Such trust characterized his life. He left his home in Ur to go to a country quite unknown to him. Later on, he held the same conviction that God will give him a son in spite of his and his wife's old age and was even willing to sacrifice his son, the son of the promise on the authority of God's word.
His faith lapsed, to be sure, in Egypt (Genesis 12:10-20), he was not sinless. But scripture commends the remarkable instances in his life when he believed God despite temptations to doubt (Hebrews 11:19). And as the fall of man still lingers on our minds, God promised redemption and blessings to all nations through Abraham's family, that "in you all the families of the earth shall be blessed." (Genesis 12:3)
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