Did you ever concentrate on the hands of a watch, trying to detect their movement? If you make note of the time and then stare at your watch for half an hour, you’ll never see the hands move, and yet at the end of the session, time will have elapsed and the face of the watch will have changed. It’s quite frustrating isn’t it? So it is with our nation’s drift away from the God of the Bible. Though you might compare today to your vivid recollection of yesteryear and see a marked difference, you probably can’t detect any major slippage since last week.
I saw an article recently pertaining to our classification of dates with respect to the life of Christ. We grew up with BC (Before Christ) which represents the years before the birth of Christ, and AD, an acronym for Anno Domini, Latin for In the year of our Lord, referring to the years since Christ’s birth. Seems a fitting system for a nation founded upon Christian principles and that unashamedly boasts mottos like: “In God we trust” and “One nation under God.”
The article pointed out that not every US citizen is a Christian, and perhaps our terminology will be offensive to those who do not believe as we do. They suggest adopting more generic terms for referencing dates, such as Before Common Era or BCE instead of Before Christ or BC. Its counterpart, Common Era or CE, they say, should be used to refer to the years after Christ’s birth. I took the author to mean that we should be careful not to offend anyone, …unless of course they happen to be Christians.
You might be asking “What difference does it make?” Well, perhaps not much, it’s just one almost undetectable tick of the clock. But if the Lord tarries, in the coming year, like the hands on your watch, the face of our beloved country will have changed in undetectable increments evenly spaced from one day, In the year of our Lord, to the next.