“And the Word became flesh, and dwelt among us, and we saw His glory, glory as of the only begotten from the Father, full of grace and truth.” (John 1:14, NASB)
Historians until recent times have always used the terms BC, meaning Before Christ, and AD, Anno Domini, meaning the Year of our Lord, placing the advent of our Lord Jesus at the center of history’s reckoning, thus affirming the timely precision of God’s salvific intentions. Mankind could not help but acknowledge the remarkable import of this stupendous fact that the second person of the Godhead stepped into time and space at a precise juncture in the history of mankind. “The Word became flesh, and dwelt among us,” and by this act became the Great Divider of history.
J.I. Packer said it well “…the supreme mystery… lies not in the Good Friday message of atonement, nor in the Easter message of the resurrection, but in the Christmas message of Incarnation. The really staggering Christmas claim is that Jesus of Nazareth was God made man—determining human destiny . . . It is here, in the thing that happened at the first Christmas, that the profoundest and most unfathomable depths of the Christian revelation lie. God became man; the divine Son became a Jew; the Almighty appeared on earth.”1
In more recent times, historians have sought to unseat Christ as the apex of historical accounting by changing the terms of history’s reckoning. Indeed, great leaders have come and gone, but only one remains as the Great Divider in both the natural and spiritual realms. The Lord Jesus is, for those who trust and adore Him, the Great Divider of their own personal history. For that individual, life before Christ stepped in was dark and purposeless, while now, redeemed by His precious blood, each year is truly the Year of their Lord.