[To follow The Ewellogy, please click on Leave a Comment above, fill in your name and email, and check the box: Notify me of new posts by email. If your comment is, “Notify me,” it won’t post publicly. If you don’t start to receive the blog by email right away, please write to me at bob@ewell.com, and I will see that you get on the list.]

With the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing coming up, we’ve been watching Chasing the Moon, a 3-part PBS documentary on American Experience. June and I were born in 1946 so we lived through the excitement of the early space age, beginning with the USSR’s launch of Sputnik in 1957. I’ll be writing more about this as the July 20 anniversary approaches.

In episode 2 of Chasing the Moon, the profound experience of hearing Genesis 1 read by the first astronauts to orbit the moon, Christmas 1968, was shown. For those of us who are believers, it was quite moving, then and now. Therefore, it was a bit disappointing to hear one of the astronauts interviewed after the fact. He said something like:

They told us to do something appropriate, that hundreds of millions of people from around the world would be watching. We didn’t know what to do, but one of us asked his wife, and she talked with a friend who suggested we read Genesis 1. It was perfect. But we didn’t consider it a particularly religious exercise. After all, all religions teach that God created the heavens and the earth and that God is up there with a super-computer keeping track of our good deeds and bad…

So here is a very bright and courageous guy, physically and mentally fit, well-educated, the best of our country’s warriors, but he was ignorant of the basic message of the Bible. The Bible he actually held in his hand and read from while going around the moon.

I guess the lesson is that we can’t assume that the folks we talk with have rejected the gospel: they may not even know what it is!

But now God has shown us a way to be made right with him without keeping the requirements of the law, as was promised in the writings of Moses and the prophets long ago. We are made right with God by placing our faith in Jesus Christ. And this is true for everyone who believes, no matter who we are. For everyone has sinned; we all fall short of God’s glorious standard. Yet God, with undeserved kindness, declares that we are righteous. He did this through Christ Jesus when he freed us from the penalty for our sins. (Romans 3.21 – 24, NLT, emphasis mine)

God saved you by his grace when you believed. And you can’t take credit for this; it is a gift from God. Salvation is not a reward for the good things we have done, so none of us can boast about it. (Ephesians 2.8, 9, NLT)

“I come in the scroll of the book; it is written of me.” ( Psalm 40.7, ESV, with a change of the location of the semicolon. Jesus comes in the book. Read it. Get to know him. Don’t be an expert in everything except the most important thing!