New Year’s 2024 A.D., which signals another of Earth’s orbits around the sun, is a great time to reflect on the passage of time, which humans have measured with calendars since antiquity.
The Gregorian calendar still in use today worldwide was adopted in 1582 after Pope Gregory XIII released a papal bull (Inter gravissimas) to replace the Julian calendar (named after Roman emperor Julius Caesar).
The Gregorian calendar spaces leap years to more closely align the calendar year with the 365.2422-day solar year to help the Roman Catholic Church schedule the great feast of Easter.
The A.D. stands for “Anno Domini” (“Year of the Lord”) and measures the years since the birth of Jesus Christ in Bethlehem of Judea, the seminal event in all history, which is divided into what happened B.C. (“Before Christ”) and after His sacred birth.
There was an effort in some quarters to change the A.D. and B.C. designations to remove the reference to Christ. Hence, you’ll sometimes see the terms B.C.E. (“Before the Common Era”) and C.E. (“Common Era”) replacing B.C. and A.D., respectively.
The irony is that even though certain people try to cancel Christ using this new terminology, the years designated by B.C.E. and C.E. still coincide with the same years designated by B.C. and A.D.
Hence, every single person in the world who writes, types or even says the year 2024 is inadvertently acknowledging the birth of Christ the King some 2,024 years ago, whether they believe in Him or not.
“That at the name of Jesus every knee shall bow in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.” — Philippians 2:10-11