Adrian Rogers on Romans 9 Pt. 2

Did God just predestine some people for hell? Are we just pawns on the chessboard of fate? No. Absolutely not.

Cruise Announcement and Upcoming Apologetics Conference

Welcome to Dividing Line. My name is James White, and that, of course, is the familiar voice of Adrian Rogers. Right before we headed off toward Alaska, which is where we were last week, we played a section of some sermons by Dr. Rogers that were aired recently, and we've gotten such a strong response to those particular programs, that one particular program, actually.

I had not intended to do any more, but since there has been so much request for completing the series as far as dealing with the rest of the sermon on Romans chapter 9, I have taken the time to put together the needed audio material, and we will be looking at that information a little bit later on in the program today on The Dividing Line.

But first, in the first half hour, the first few minutes, the first half hour anyways, I want to give you a little bit of a report on where we were last week and what's coming up in December of 2003. We had a lot of folks, especially in the channel, we would talk about the fact we were heading up to Alaska on an apologetics cruise, and people were saying, oh, I wish I had known, I wish I had heard, I wish I had known earlier so I could have saved up for it, etc., etc., etc.

So we're going to, in essence, rip all of the possible excuses out of everyone's hands so that come December of 2003, anyone in channel who dares to whine about not having heard early enough, we can just simply sit and mock them, because they will have heard plenty early enough, because we're going to let you know, beginning this week, what we are planning.

And to help me do that, I have enlisted the help of the cruise master himself, the man who knows how to cruise, and especially, I think, I don't know, Mike, you knew, I've got to tell a story, you took me directly to the Mater D as soon as we got on the Mercury a couple weeks ago, and I don't know if you noticed, but you were like a hound dog on ascent.

I mean, you knew exactly where you were going. Did you recognize that when we got on the boat?

Well, I knew exactly where we were going because originally we had a room scheduled in the back of the boat and I was told that the Mater D would be changing table assignments in the back of the ship and then we were placed in another lounge.

I don't know, that particular place was on the other side of the gambling area, so I mean, you know, it just seems a little suspicious here, just how we just went straight back there.

Well, I knew that you had probably been assigned a wrong table, I think that was the case, right?

Yes, it was.

I think you were assigned with a number of Mormons.

Well, you know, we actually probably should have just left that alone. It would have made for some interesting food fights toward the end of the cruise, I would imagine. Oh, look, I dropped my flaming baked Alaska on this guy, what a bummer.

Well, your 15-minute presentation on Mormonism was complete and exhaustive and wonderful.

Well, hey, 15 minutes is better than nothing at all, I always say. But anyways, we are joined by Michael Fallon all the way from Florida, where it's probably considerably more humid there than it is here.

Yeah, we're enjoying the Tropical Storm Hannah, the terror of Tropical Storm Hannah. I heard sprinkling a few minutes ago.

A real bad one, huh?

Absolutely.

Well, it's 102 here, but the humidity is only 14%.

Well, you can swim to your car here.

I bet you probably can right now.

We had a great time, didn't we?

We did, and it was a beautiful ship, beautiful creation, the inside passage was gorgeous, and of course, hovered glacier, and I had no idea that glaciers made noises like that. Did you know about that before you heard that stuff?

Oh, yeah, I'd heard about it, but when you're out there, and I mean, and this was like, it's like a thunderclap that's a mile away from you.

It was incredible.

And the boom, it would be like if you could take an ice cube and drop it into a warm glass of water, and I imagine that happens a lot in Phoenix.

It does.

And go ahead and then increase that sound by a million.

Yeah.

That's what the sound is like.

Well, when you have an ice wall that's, you know, six miles wide and hundreds of feet tall, it definitely was quite the experience hearing that, seeing the shell calving as pieces of ice came off of that.

It was gorgeous, and of course, I have to mention this, Mike, I'm sorry. I hadn't planned on doing this, but I did get to see the Northern Lights, and the night before.

Yeah, thanks for calling me, Jim.

That was not ESPN.

It was not ESPN at that. You're out there singing praises to God and watching the Northern Lights.

Yes, and well, you were asleep. What can I say? You know, I thought you were off doing something else, and there I was standing on the darkest part of the ship. It was the best place for seeing the sky, and I'm telling you, how many people are on that boat, about 3 ,000?

In total with crew, yeah, about 3 ,000.

About 3 ,000 people on this boat, and I am at the best place on the boat for observing the skies, and I am the only person there as the Aurora Borealis, the Northern Lights explode above us in just grandeur, and I keep looking around going, am I dreaming this?

I mean, shouldn't this whole deck be filled with people? And I would look over, and as you know, Mike, you were on the same level with the pseudo-Jim there, and then right above it was the, I think it was called the Navigator Lounge, and there's this guy sitting in the Navigator Lounge.

You can look out over the front of the ship from there, and he's sitting there with something to drink, I suppose, reading a book. You've got to figure eventually he probably noticed the guy staying out there staring up into the sky for like 35 minutes, and it never crossed his mind.

You know, I bet you there's something up there he's looking at. It was a very, very strange thing.

Well, you know the amazing part about that is that that was the first day since February of this year that they had had the Aurora Borealis, and you caught it.

Not only did I catch it, but think about it. This is something that we thank the Lord for, but we were blessed with incredible weather the whole trip. I mean, the folks on the ship told us that they had had pretty much rain, rain, rain, rain the whole time, and so when we were at the glacier, it was as clear as could be.

The night before with the Aurora Borealis, I mean, it was just incredible, and of course, I must take my hat off to you, Mike. I am not much of an eater, and we'd go to these five-star restaurants, and we'd have prime rib or beef tenderloin or filet mignon and all sorts of salmon and all these fish things and pasta things and a bunch of Italian and French words I couldn't even really figure out, and all I'd do is I'd just have my one little entree.

And your glass of skim milk.

And my glass of skim milk with the dessert.

Which the waiter would bring to him. The waiter would try to be on the ball and bring it to you every night, and then also the busboy would bring you another glass.

That's right.

They were very, very good. Everyone's been going, where's Nenga? Come on, get back here, Nenga. I'm having to fix my own food all of a sudden. What's the problem here? Poor guys off in Bali someplace going, I'm glad I'm rid of them.

But anyways, but unlike you and a certain person who is in the channel right now, you all discovered a long time ago you don't have to just have one entree. You can have two or three of them, can't you?

Well, if you're talking about Simon Escobedo, we both, as well as my wife, is the one that really first turned me on to that. And my wife can out-eat me.

Oh, oh, oh.

But she stays at a stout 106 pounds. And, of course, we have merited our shapes, have we not?

Oh, yeah, well.

Maybe not unmerited.

I haven't gotten, but see, I don't eat that much, and I still have that shape. So it's a terrible, horrible thing. It's a curse from God. But anyways, it was a wonderful time, and we had a beautiful conference center on this ship.

It was considerably better than a few places we've been before, where I was using cocktail napkins and everything else to prop up my digital projector on a bar someplace to try to project it on something somewhere to try to be able to do a presentation.

We had a beautiful conference center, digital projector to use, nice seats. It was really neat.

Desks included, too, for writing, so.

Yeah, the desks, you pull those things up. It was really, really nice. It was excellent for the presentations. I spoke on open theism and inclusivism, and we had some new folks on the trip this time. Dr. Job Martin, everyone just loved him.

Dr. Martin gave a fantastic presentation on biblical creation, and also showing the difference between that and the secular worldview. He just was very entertaining to listen to. He spoke twice, actually, and you could really come away with a lot from him.

Oh, you certainly could. He has a book out and some videos, and it was really, really neat, and a wonderful family and a great addition to the cruise. Of course, Mike and Jane Gendron were there, and we talked about Roman Catholicism and evangelism and had 300 Mormon dentists on the boat.

Well, probably not all of them were Mormon dentists. They probably brought their wives along. But the Utah Dental Association was on board, so we got to share at least with a couple of Mormon folks while we were there, even though for some reason after an hour-long conversation, they never came back.

I'm not really sure if it was just what that was, but we did have the opportunity of sharing the gospel there. Yes, indeed. Well, that's done, unfortunately, and I've got my land legs back, and the world has stopped shaking because anyone who ever goes on a cruise, at least the first year it didn't really do that because it was only a four-day, three-night cruise, but you go on a seven-day cruise and you just get used to living on something that's moving, and therefore you get home and you touch anything that ain't moving, and all of a sudden there are waves washing underneath your house.

It's a very interesting experience.

Yeah, you're taking a shower and you think, oh, that was a big one.

Yeah, that was a big wave. It's true. It's exactly how you feel for a couple of days, but that has unfortunately passed, and so looking toward the future, you have already been on the ball, shall we say, and you have set aside December 6th of 2003 for our next Apologetics Cruise, and that'll be on the Holland America.

Zandam, Z-A-A-N-D-A-M, correct?

That's correct.

All right, and anyone who wants to see the Zandam? And I think the, is this the Western Caribbean route?

This will be an Eastern Caribbean itinerary.

Eastern Caribbean itinerary, okay. And those are available at HollandAmerica .com if someone wanted to just see the pictures that they have and all the rest of that stuff, right?

Yes, and we will be having something up on your website probably within this next week.

Right.

But as someone who right now wanted to know what the Zandam was, what it looked like, stuff like that, that information is available. Now, why Holland America?

Well, Holland America is pretty much considered the premium line of cruise ships right now, anything that is below $10 ,000 a week, let's say. And Holland America has got phenomenal service. My wife and I cruised them for the first time this past year.

Exceptional service, a lower passenger ratio, so you're not so crowded. One little frustration sometimes we have is just finding a place to sit sometimes.

Yeah.

But you don't have that problem with Holland America. Not only that, but just ease of flow of getting one place to another, as well as the food is exceptional, and they're excellent about providing for services such as what we do.

Also because their ships are beautiful. Their cabins are much larger than your regular premium cruise lines, that kind of thing. So if you want to really take advantage of an opportunity, and I think most importantly, we say apologetics cruise.

This should be called the conference cruise, and this next time we're going to be spending much more time really zeroed in on one subject, and that is the most important. Do you want to talk about that at all, Chan?

Yeah, we have talked about the fact that as we look back over the past couple of cruises, we've done some pretty interesting subjects, but they've been sort of all over the map as far as very important to Christian apologetics, but there wasn't one specific theme that just necessarily tied everything together.

I guess the second cruise there was as far as the biblical aspects and stuff, but still you've got stuff on Old Testament, you've got stuff on the King James, you've got stuff on justification, you've got all sorts of stuff put together.

And so as we were thinking about the next cruise, I started thinking about the fact that if really serious people, people who are serious about being trained and learning and growing in their knowledge and understanding, if really serious people wanted to be involved in a cruise, then what you'd want to do is you'd want to have some preparation beforehand.

And to have preparation beforehand, you need to have a specific topic and you need to be able to send people reading lists and materials that they can be looking at and they can be up to speed on, so that one of the problems you have is if you don't do that, then the seminars you have on the ship while you're at sea, you basically have, you're faced with the, well, it's an issue we normally have, and that is, do you start from ground zero every single time that you do a presentation?

I mean, if you don't, you're going to lose a lot of folks who are not prepared to really delve into the deeper elements of doing apologetic ministry. And so what we want to do this time around is we want to have the topic set beforehand and we've chosen to put everything under the umbrella of giving a Christian response to Islam.

Obviously, we are going to hope that most of our waiters and the crew are not Muslims, but...

Well, seeing as they're mainly from Indonesia...

You never know. Actually, I think we had some Buddhists with us the last time. But anyways, not so much focused upon, you know, we probably will do some things on Muhammad or something like that, but more what are the issues that we deal with when giving an apologetic response to Islam, which would include the doctrine of the Trinity, the doctrine of the deity of Christ, giving a response to the Islamic position.

Who knows? Maybe we can even find a time to show the Malik debate, so that people can... and invite everybody to see, because both sides will be presented.

Or invite Malik along.

Well, that could be real interesting. Yeah, right. Put him right in the middle of one of those tables. That would be a very interesting trip.

Oh, it would be a hard time getting out of port every time.

I think so, yeah. But we could, then of course, the transmission of the text of scripture, because obviously Islam is very big into denying the accuracy of the Bible. And in fact, that's what I was spending most of my free time on the cruise, was writing an article for the CRI Journal on that very subject, which hopefully we could be able to get CRI's permission to be able to share with folks, even by next December, when we do this.

So, what we're going to be doing, then, is putting together a reading list. And we don't have all of this worked out yet, because I would really like to utilize yourself, Simon, Rich, Warren, the people that are part of our ministry, and do some more personalized type of training.

And if we have time, you know, we've got 15 months, then we can get focused upon certain areas. And when people come from wherever it is across the United States, they become a part of this. And of course, this cruise leaves out of Cape Canaveral, right?

That's correct.

And the day before, we're going to be doing something, we're planning on anyways on doing something at the Cape, right?

Yeah, we'll be offering to folks, if they do come early, to be able to spend one day. It might end up being in Orlando, because I believe that's the international airport that services that area. And either in Orlando or at Cape Canaveral itself.

So an event with Dr. White. You can spend time with him.

Yeah, cool. That's me. Anyway, whenever I hear people think that, I think, is there an older fellow that's going to be coming along with this or something? I don't know. Oh, that's me. Never mind. Someone on the channel was telling me about how my problems may be due to aspartame or something.

But anyways, I really appreciate that confidence-building thing. But back to the cruise. So we're going to be leaving out of there. And before folks get there, before we get on the cruise and head down, which, by the way, is after hurricane season.

I hope everyone caught that. Because a lot of folks, whenever we mention that, I automatically hear people saying, well, don't they get those big storms out there?

I think we learned our lesson. We held a conference. Our first cruise conference was in September of the year 1999. And we had the great opportunity to have a travel depression group develop over us as we were in the Gulf of Mexico, if you remember that correctly.

I do. I do.

And so hence why we are moving this all the way up to December. And that sort of thing just does not occur during December. The weather is beautiful in the Virgin Islands during that time of year. It's moderately cool.

Skies are blue. Air is dry. It's fantastic. Great time to be out there.

In fact, it was really nice even up in Alaska this past trip. That one cruise was one time we had a fair amount of rainy weather. But anyways, before people get there, before we get on the cruise, then they will have the opportunity of doing this study.

And then when we get on the cruise, the bases have been covered, the foundations have been built, and now we can do advanced studies of these particular issues and really get into the more technical questions, the type of questions that would allow Christian leaders to really give an answer for the faith in a meaningful fashion without having to go back and basically start from, well, Islam is a religion and this is the Quran.

We don't have to do that because we've covered that beforehand.

Well, Islam means peace, right?

Sorry.

Okay. You have now been volunteered to lead the discussion, Does Islam Mean Peace?

Peace and submission, yes.

Yes, that's right. There you go.

I'll tell you one thing. I was driving from Federal Express on the way back over here, and I heard in the car Chuck Colson was giving his daily update. And this is something that he said. It kind of relates to the subject and possibly to what you're doing here with Adrian Rogers.

And he said, Sure, God could have prevented the events of 9 -11 from happening, but to do so he would have had to violate our free will and turn us into robots. That's Chuck Colson's response to 9 -11.

That poor apostle Paul got knocked off of his horse and had his free will violated all over the place. Man, turned into a blithering robot. What a bummer. Well, anyway, so that's what we are planning now.

This week, Lord willing, and you're given the opportunity to get together everything you need to get together, we're going to be posting basically through the link that's right now, sort of old, because it's about the 2002 cruise, through that link we're going to be posting the information about what is available.

And tell folks, what are the advantages to them in making a commitment early?

Well, if you make a commitment early, and that would be before October 1st, we are offering a $100 per berth reduction, which would be $200 total off of each stateroom. The regular price for the stateroom is going to be $899 per berth, and that would be for an inside cabin.

You would then have your price reduced to $799 per berth. Same thing would happen with the outside cabins, with the window from $1 ,106 down to $1 ,006, also with the verandas and so forth. So far, and that kind of thing down the line, that's how we're trying to make an incentive for people to say, yes, we would like to get on board, we want to plug into this, we don't want just a vacation, we want to be able to be a part of Dr. White's ministry, as well as be educated the best we can, and be able to defend our faith against a lot of the attacks that are coming from Islam.

Great, excellent. So we will have that information on our website, Lord willing, by later this week. A lot of people listen to this on Archive, even though many people right now are listening live, thanks to the crazy Canadian named Pete.

That's how we're broadcasting right now. A lot of folks will be listening either later this week or even after that. If you are listening by an archived program, then you should be able to just hit the website and be able to see this link right off the main page in regards to the Apologetics Cruise for 2003.

I know of people who wanted to go. As it got close, they really, really, really wanted to go. But by the time, sort of like air travel things, the closer you get, the more it costs. The price right now is outrageously good, but there's just simply nothing that we can do about the fact that the closer and closer you get, the more the price goes up.

So now is the time to make the commitment and do that. Now, if folks have lots and lots of questions, or if they do have lots and lots of questions, we'll probably be forwarding their questions on to you, ye of the many, many answers, right?

Yes, and I believe you'll have a way in which they can link over to my e-mail. And feel free to ask me any questions that you need to. Now, isn't it true that this cruise, aren't we having the Great Zucchini come along?

Yeah, the Great Zucchini is supposed to be coming along. And he's going to be giving specific seminars on how to fill tape orders while PHP programming and answering the phone all at the same time. In fact, we're going to have some demonstrations of this that are going to be done, and we're going to videotape them.

And people are going to be just absolutely amazed at this man's capacities.

It's fantastic that you guys are going to have this time and basically the entire staff, most of the staff I should say, of Alpha and Omega Ministries.

Well, we're telling some of them, some of them are going, ah, you know, I'll never be able to do that. And we're telling them, look, you've got plenty of time, we'll make it work out. So we're getting a head start on everything here.

And yeah, Zucchini just said the entire staff, both of them.

I was trying to build you up there a little, Jason.

Yeah, I know, I know. He was talking to some ministry this past week, and they were saying, well, you know, we're not a real big ministry. We only have one floor and 40 employees.

Well, let me let you in on this, and this is exciting. I've been trying to contact the last two days a church, there's a couple churches in St. Thomas, and we might possibly be doing one of our seminars, of course one of our seminars that would be headed up by you, on St. Thomas in a church.

No, no, you don't seem to understand. That would require that I actually walk off of the ship.

That's the point.

That's the only way I can get you off the boat.

I figure if you're getting, if I'm already in the five-star resort, why do I have to leave it? I don't understand that part. I like it. It's great there.

Well, this will be a first, so you don't want to miss this. Jim nervously takes a step off, one small step first. Yeah, that whole thing.

Hey, I want you to, as Zucchini just asked me, don't they have those RCC voodoo cults down there?

Oh, yeah, yeah, Santeria.

There you go. I'm dead meat, but I want you to know. I did get off the boat. I did get off the Paradise once. Don't you remember that?

No.

I helped Steve carry his boxes off.

Oh, you mean St. Thomas?

Yes.

For a second, then you ran back on board.

Please don't leave without me. You're exactly right. You've got it nailed. Well, anyways, Mike, thanks for joining us this first half. I was just going to go a couple minutes, and here we're coming up on our break.

It's absolutely amazing. But thank you for all that you do in putting these cruises together. They have been a wonderful experience. I never thought I'd ever get on one of those things, but lo and behold, three times now, and they've all been just wonderful, and looking really, really forward to December 6th, 2003, Holland America's Zandam Eastern Caribbean Cruise, and that's what we're going to be doing.

All right, man, thanks for joining us.

God bless.

All right, God bless.

Bye-bye.

The Dividing Line Returns to Adrian Rogers on Romans 9

All right, we're going to go ahead and take our first break, and when we come back, we're going to dive into the subject of Adrian Rogers' sermon on Romans Chapter 9. We'll be right back. And welcome back.

Whoa, zoom there. There goes Steve. Steve just fell right out of the piano right there, and I think he'll be fine. Anyways, a couple of weeks ago now, we recorded our first response to Adrian Rogers' recent sermons, which were aired on his nationwide broadcast concerning Romans Chapters 8 and 9.

Now, Dr. Rogers is not reformed in his soteriology in any way, shape, or form, and so therefore we have been providing a critique of the interpretations of those passages that were offered. Of course, we also, I want to point out, applauded him in his presentation on justification.

It was very well done. Dr. Rogers is a tremendously talented speaker, and unfortunately, as we pointed out the last time, he has traditions, and those traditions, unfortunately, end up overruling the exegetical methodology that he normally utilizes in dealing with other issues where he does not have a tradition that gets in the way of the biblical text.

And so we have a number of cuts, and I need to get to them if we're going to get through almost any of them today at all in the hour that we have left to us. This first cut's just a very short one, but it demonstrates the importance of a consistent theology because you will hear here what happens when you have a tradition of universal atonement, universal redemption in that sense, that does not fit in Romans Chapter 9.

I read this correctly, and most commentators agree that what Paul is saying is that I would be willing to go to hell if they could be saved. That was impossible. Jesus had already died for them. Jesus had already baptized his soul in hell.

Now, notice something immediately here. This is right at the beginning. It's Romans Chapter 9, beginning verses 1 through 3. And as we mentioned last time, you sort of need to put these two programs together so you'll have some of the context.

We worked through Romans 8. We saw the many problems with the interpretations provided by Dr. Rogers at that particular point in time. And now in Romans 9, he's talking about the fact that there is an issue here.

And notice at the beginning, Dr. Rogers recognizes that Paul is talking about salvation. He's talking about how Paul would be willing to go to hell for his Jewish brothers and sisters if they would but be saved.

Now, that is not going to remain consistent. And we're going to focus some energy on how it is that Arminians try to make the shift from recognizing that the beginning of Romans Chapter 9 and obviously the end of Romans Chapter 8, we are talking about salvation, to all of a sudden, now we're talking about national blessing.

We're talking about nations rather than individuals and salvation falls out of the picture. We will see that it doesn't fall out of the picture, but Dr. Rogers will say that it does. And notice that in this particular passage, he makes reference to the idea, well, Jesus has already died for them.

Well, even from his own perspective, that would have to do with salvation itself. Would it not? Well, of course it would. And unfortunately, that consistency does not follow through through the rest of this particular section.

Now, in this next clip, Dr. Rogers is going to talk about how hard Romans Chapter 9 is. Well, it's not really hard. The only reason that it's hard for Dr. Rogers is that he has his traditions, he won't abandon them, and you simply cannot fit those traditions in with the text and remain consistent.

But unfortunately, this passage has a lot of misrepresentation in it. For some reason, all through this section, Dr. Rogers keeps emphasizing stuff about little babies. God loves little babies. He's not going to condemn little babies as if God makes his eternal choice of election only once a person is a little baby.

No, this is an eternal choice long before our birth in time. But listen to what he has to say.

Now, here are the three things I want you to notice, and it's going to help to solve the problem because, very frankly, folks, the ninth chapter of Romans is one of the hardest chapters in all of the Bible.

And you can get led astray very easily. And there's some who read this and say, God has just chosen some when they're little children, little babies, just to go to hell. There's nothing they can do about it.

And God has chosen others to go to heaven, and there's nothing they can do to keep it from happening. And there's a lot of theology that believes that. I don't believe it. I don't accept it for a moment.

Well, of course, when he says there's a lot of theology that believes that, he's making reference to Reformed theology. But that's a misrepresentation of Reformed theology as well, obviously, because it is not fair to the presentation that is being made.

But, you know, Hitler and Stalin were once little babies too. To simply put it the way he's putting it here is to completely ignore the eternal nature of the choice that is God's. He not only doesn't believe what the Bible says about God's sovereignty and salvation, but evidently he is so attached to the traditions that he has embraced in place of that truth that he will not even consider the errors of his own position.

He will not even listen fairly to the Reformed position, because if you can't represent it fairly, if you have to use all sorts of emotionalism, as he does with the little babies stuff, then obviously you're not listening fairly to what is being said, and you're not giving a meaningful response to that.

Well, let's go on with the next section of the sermon.

God's Sovereign Choice in Romans 9

I want you to see three reasons why. Now, the first thing I want you to see is what I'm going to call God's sovereign choice. God's sovereign choice. Paul is reminding these people that God is a sovereign God, and he can choose whom he will for what he will.

Well, except we already heard that Dr. Rogers understands this sovereign choice to be within the context of his understanding of foreknowledge. And so God is sovereign in, say, choosing to use the Jews as a nation.

God is sovereign in national events. But when it comes to, well, the very issue that brings him the greatest glory, and that is the salvation of a people in Jesus Christ, we've already seen that what he means by God's sovereignty is that he has sovereignly chosen to save, not that he has sovereignly chosen the individuals who are saved.

And so this sovereign choice, this freedom of God, is extremely limited in reality in the Arminian perspective.

The word of God hath taken none effect, for they are not all Israel, which are of Israel. That is, not every Jew is a part of the spiritual promise, neither because are they the seed of Abraham are they all the children.

It is not necessarily according to parentage or lineage, but in Isaac shall thy seed be called. Abraham had two sons, Ishmael and Isaac. God did not choose Ishmael. God chose Isaac.