Hi, it's David Platt. Have you signed up for Secret Church 25 yet? It's happening online, April 11th,

and I would love for you to join us. We're going to spend six hours together studying the book of

Matthew, discovering how to make our lives count for what matters most, and praying for our

persecuted family around the world. Prices go up after February 25th, so register today at radical.net

slash SC25. I'd love to see you there. Pray the word with David Platt is a resource from

radical.net. Numbers chapter 1, verses 1 and 2. The Lord spoke to Moses in the wilderness of

Sinai in the tent of meeting

on the first day of the second month, in the second year after they had come out of the land of

Egypt, saying, take a census of all the congregation of the people of Israel, by clans, by

father's houses, according to the number of names. I'm just going to stop there.

This is how the book of numbers begins.

And it continues in these initial chapters that when we're reading through the Bible,

we have a tendency to kind of gloss over.

Because it's just a list of names, all these different individual names.

And I'm not saying we need to meditate on each one of these names and numbers that are listed here,

like thousands of people, but I do think there are significant takeaways for us from chapters

like this.

One chapters like this point us to the beauty of

the Bible as a book of history. So unlike many other religious books, the Bible is recorded history. It's

not just the writings of one particular person or this particular group of people.

It's a historical account that can be attested to over 1,500 years.

And over and over again, the Bible has been proven historically, geographically,

...