Jesus is a hard guy to get away from …  And the funny thing is that by trying to ignore Him, the cultural and academic elite only highlight the futility of their struggle.

I read a lot of history. Not long ago, I was reading an otherwise decent book on a series of battles in World War II. Unnecessarily, the author repeatedly referred to the events taking place not in “1943” but in “1943 CE.” The designation “CE” stands for “Common Era,” a creation of the Age of Enlightenment by German and French academicians eager to remove Jesus from their day. The author of the book I was reading clearly wanted folks to know he was an academic, and not some Jesus guy.

Let me step back.

There is nothing biblical about using “A.D.”—Anno Domini, Latin for Year of the Lord—on the calendar. After all, we don’t equate calling the third month of the year “March” with worship of the Roman god of war, Mars. Even today, the Hebrew calendar uses Anno Mundi—the year of the world—referring to what they believe to be the first day of Creation. By their reckoning, this isn’t 2026, but rather 5786.

But the centrality of Christianity in Western Civilization has meant that the dating system developed some 500 years after the life of Jesus has taken sway. Our dating is based on imprecise work done some two hundred years earlier, when a monk named Dionysius attempted to determine how many years people had been celebrating Easter.

So while Jesus was most likely born three to seven years before 1 A.D., the calendar was nonetheless an honest attempt to align the dating of current events with the arrival of the Son of God and Savior of mankind.

Every culture has set dates based on its perception of significant events, whether it is the reign of a monarch or the creation of the world. Our own Constitution notes that it was completed on Sept. 17th “in the Year of our Lord one thousand seven hundred and Eighty seven and of the Independence of the United States of America the Twelfth.”

All of that is what makes the use of “CE” and “BCE” (Before the Common Era) somewhat laughable. Removing Jesus from the calendar isn’t the power move secularists believe it to be. At best, the vaguely confusing “common era” designation is an exercise in futility.

Whether one likes the existence of gravity or not, we are nonetheless held to the ground by it. However diligently we ignore its existence, there it remains. The use of “common era” is similarly an attempt to ignore the most pivotal event in human history … even while still using it as such.

The euphemism itself, “common,” demands certain inconvenient questions. What is most common about the era? Our common sin. Each of us lives, whether we like to admit it or not, in desperate need of a Savior. What we hold in common is that God the Father had His Son step into time to do what we could not do for ourselves.

Shun Him, ignore Him, mock Him… None of it is new to Him. Like the proverbial elephant in the room, the reality of Jesus is not impacted even by our common dismissal of Him.

As the Prophet Isaiah wrote and the Apostle Paul later quoted, a time is coming when “every knee shall bow … and every tongue shall confess.” On that day, we will all, in common, recognize Him as Lord.