As people increased in number they also increased in wickedness. Pretty soon people were so evil God realized he needed to start over. But not quite all over. There was one man and his family whom God saw as righteous. One man who lived up to the plan and lived in unity and harmony with God, Noah. So Noah his family and a whole bunch of animals spent nearly a year on a very large boat while God flooded the rest of the earth. At the end of the flood God made a promise to never flood the entire world again and gave us the rainbow as a symbol of His promise so that we can remember every time it rains. We need those types of reminders, God does not. Pretty soon things went wrong again (you'll hear that a lot throughout the Bible). This time however, instead of the people being wicked in a way you would normally think, they became proud. Pride is every bit as evil as any other sin and definitely more sneaky. In their pride the people thought, “let us build ourselves a city, with a tower that reaches to the heavens”. They thought that through their own power they could become great and make a name for themselves. God knew that they would only get worse if allowed to continue in this way, so He “confused their language” and “scattered them over all the earth”. Now the people were not one people, but many. In all these many people God would choose one person to grow into one nation to bring the whole world back to Him. That one person was named Abram.
When God called to Abram He gave Abram a promise: Follow me where I lead you and “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you. . .and all peoples on earth will be blessed through you.” This was God's plan to bring everyone back into unity and harmony with Him. But, Abram needed to trust God, to show that he was in unity with God's plan. To show this he went to a strange country with his wife, took the poorer country when there were too many people between him and his nephew, and he prospered because of his faith in God. There was one thing though. God said he would be the father of many nation, but he had no children. God gave him a symbol that he could see every night to remind hims of the promise. God said his offspring would be as numerous as the stars. Now every time he looked into the night sky he could remember God's promise, God would remember even without the stars. However, Abram had a little trouble with his wife. She thought that Abram should start his line with a servant because she didn't seem to be able to provide him any offspring. So he listened to his wife. He had a child with the servant Hagar. God spoke to Hagar and told her about the son she would have and to name him Ishmael. But God told Abram that this was not the child promised to him. There would be a son born of Abram and Sarai. When Abram was 99 years old God changed his name to Abraham, his wife's name to Sarah and said that the promised son was on his way. Soon Abraham and Sarah gave birth to there first born son, Issac, the son of the promise.
