Jerry Bowyer: And He shall reign forever and ever

MYRNA BROWN, HOST: Today is Friday, January 12th, 2024. Good morning! This is The World and Everything in It from listener-supported WORLD Radio. I’m Myrna Brown.

NICK EICHER, HOST: And I’m Nick Eicher. Up next: WORLD Opinions Commentator Jerry Bowyer on something so simple as saying the day, date, and year, and how we declare the sovereignty of God when we do.

JERRY BOWYER: “Now in the fifteenth year of the reign of Tiberius Caesar … the word of God came to John the son of Zechariah in the wilderness.…” Why would it matter that John the Baptist’s ministry started fifteen years after Tiberius became emperor of Rome? Regnal dating is why. The people of Christendom have gotten used to a calendar that doesn’t restart every time a monarch dies. But the revolutionary shock of a universal and unending calendar should not be lost on us any longer. Every time we sign a contract or a check and write the number 2024 we are declaring the sovereign dominion of Jesus the Christ.

Regnal or “kingly” dating was the common practice among pagans to reset the calendar whenever one king died and another took his place. In ancient Rome, the announcement of a new emperor was a “euangelion,” in English a “Gospel.” But what happens when we have a King who will never die? What happens is that the calendar keeps adding numbers as that new kingdom accumulates more years of reign.

Sometimes, especially in the East, dynastic dating is used, as in the Quin Dynasty and the Ming Dynasty of China. But the principle is still the same—it is still rulership according to the flesh and it is subject to decay and death.

The modern world often attempts to reset history according to new ideologies. The French Revolution tried to reset the clock with “year one,” but the experiment lasted less than a generation. The dictator Pol Pot’s murderous regime also declared a Year One. But that too passed and has been forgotten. The current dynasty in North Korea has attempted to blend ideology and lineage into one by launching the Juche Calendar, dated from the birth of the grandfather of the current dictator. Who wants to take bets on whether it will still be around 2,024 years from now?

The American “Revolution” largely avoided the Year Zero ideology that would be adopted by the French shortly thereafter. The Novus Ordo Seclorum on the national seal (which you can find on the back of your dollar bills) does indeed mark a “New Order of the Ages,” but one that exists within the Gregorian dating of the era of Christ, not as an interruption of it.

The academic trend to scrap BC and AD in favor of BCE (Before Common Era) and CE (Common Era) unintentionally emphasizes the sovereignty of Christ. No one is leading the charge to change Thursday into a generic Day 5, because no one fears Thor any longer. Jesus is He who must not be named, even in Latin. There is some Christian talk about keeping BCE and CE intact but redefining them as Before Christian Era and Christian Era respectively. But this concedes too much. Some hope that this Christian Era will fade away as did the Ming. But A.D., Anno Domini, declares that He is Lord, not just that we think He is, but that He actually is.

So, let’s commit ourselves to live as faithful believers in this Year of Our Lord, 2024.

I’m Jerry Bowyer.

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