IPTables not flushing?

[Anthony]

I'm playing around with iptables and have inserted a few new rules.
Now, I want to flush them all so I use

iptables -F

Then, I restart the firewall with

service iptables restart

and everything looks like it's restarting alright. But when I list the
rules using

iptables -L

I get a list of rules THAT INCLUDE all of the rules I've defined
before the flush!

Am I reading this wrong or is something weird with my iptables?

Thanks,
Anthony