Apollo 8 Christmas Message

In 1968, the astronauts aboard Apollo 8 circling the moon, sent a live Christmas message to earth by reading from Genesis 1:1-10 in the King James Bible. The estimated one billion people who heard the broadcast was the largest audience to ever listen to a human voice at the time. Borman said, “The only instructions that we got from NASA was to do something appropriate,” so he, Jim Lovell, and Bill Anders took turns reading the Scripture. They concluded the historic broadcast by saying, “And God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.” Madelyn Murray O’Hair, founder of the American Atheists, collected 28,000 signatures on a petition demanding that government employees be prohibited from citing Scripture while on duty, but other Americans sent NASA more than 2.5 million letters and petitions in support of the astronaut’s actions. O’Hair sued the U.S. government, but lost the case in the courts. Later she lost her head at the hands of a murderer she had hired in her atheist business. We understand that NASA has since forbade the reading of God’s Word by astronauts, and to our knowledge it has not happened again. In Christ’s coming kingdom, there will never again be such godless restriction, and the wonderful Creator will be glorified in everything.

(Friday Church News Notes, January 23, 2015, www.wayoflife.org, fbns@wayoflife.org, 866-295-4143)

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