It is such a pleasure, now, to take some time in the evenings to decompress from the constant business of the day and study God's Word. Right now, I am reading through the book of 1st Chronicles, and you know what that means:

Lots and lots and LOTS of names!

This man was the father of that man, and that man was the father of the other man, and the other man was the father of still another man, and so on for pages and pages. I wonder how well I'm going to fare when I start memorizing these sections.

But Chronicles serves a good purpose. A lot of modern scholars try to pass off the miraculous occurrences of the Bible as fairy-tales or mythology. But Chronicles goes to great lengths to make it very clear: The Bible is history. It's very, very boring history a times. But that's the way history can sometimes be. All this stuff really happened. And since all these meticulously recorded facts are correct, so are all the really amazing things that are found in other parts of the Bible.

After forty days, Noah opened the window he had made in the ark and sent out a raven, and it kept flying back and forth until the water had dried up from the earth. Then he sent out a dove, to see if the water had receded from the surface of the ground. But the dove could find no place to set its feet, because there was water all over the surface of the earth, so it returned to Noah in the ark. He reached out his hand and took the dove and brought it back to himself in the ark. He waited seven more days and again sent out the dove from the ark. When the dove returned to Him in the evening, there in its beak was a freshly plucked olive leaf! Then Noah knew that the water had receded from the earth. He waited seven more days and sent the dove out again, but this time it did not return to him.