In the eighteenth year of the reign of Jeroboam, Abijah became king of Judah, - 2 Chronicles 13:1

Today's Scripture Reading (December 31, 2022): 2 Chronicles 13

Do you know what happened on October 12, 1582? My mother's birthday is October 12, which is just a random piece of information, but she wasn't born in 1582. The answer to what happened on October 12, 1582, throughout our entire planet is nothing. No one was born, no one died, no wars were fought, no scientific advancements were made, and nobody even woke up in the morning or went to bed at night on that day in 1582. In fact, October 12, 1582, was near the end of the most boring ten days in history. Why? Because the days from October 5 to 14, 1582, don't actually exist. People went to bed on Thursday, October 4, 1582, and woke up on Friday, October 15, 1582. In an effort to correct the shift that had happened in our calendar, we moved from the Julian Calendar to the Gregorian Calendar. The problem was that when measured against solar events, there had been some significant drift. The shortest day of the year was no longer December 21; now, it was December 11. And unless something were done, that date would continue to drift until our seasons were all messed up. So they did two things. First, they changed the way that we counted leap years. Instead of celebrating a leap year every four years, they eliminated three leap years every four hundred years. So, according to the new rule, any year divisible by 100 is not a leap year unless it is also divisible by 400. So, according to that rule, the year 2000 was a leap year, but the years 2100, 2200, and 2300 won't be. The second thing they did was make the jump from Thursday, October 4, 1582, to Friday, October 15, 1582. The days in between simply don't exist; they never happened.

We made another, maybe less significant, change more recently when we moved from the notation AD (Anno Domini) to CE (Common Era or what we in the church sometimes call the Christian Era). Nothing changed with respect to the dates on our calendars, although I still have friends who request AD whenever I give a date using the CE notation because they say the new notation confuses them. But nothing more than a change in notation took place; the dates stayed the same.

Chronicles focuses on the reigns of the Judean Kings. The only mention of the Kings of Israel in the north is to give us some idea of the era in which they ruled. So, the author of Chronicles tells us that the reign of Abijah began eighteen years into the reign of Jeroboam in the north. Dates were not coordinated in any way. Usually, they were just counted from some national event. The Bible often dates the reigns of the Kings in the South according to the reigns of the Kings in the north. And for the Kings in the north, the reverse is usually true, and they are dated by the reigns of the Kings of the South. So even though they were often adversaries, the two Kingdoms remained intimately tied together.

Tonight, we turn the calendar page one more time. It is hard to believe that 2022 has already come to an end, and tomorrow we begin another year. Welcome to 2023. May you be blessed by the events in store for you in the coming year (and may none of your days be missing).

Tomorrow's Scripture Reading: 2 Chronicles 14