In 1989, at the end of the Cold War, American political philosopher, Francis Fukuyama announced the end of history. He presumed that at the collapse of the Soviet Union, the world would settle into a quiet and inevitable trend toward liberal democracy. Of course, Fukuyama was found to be wrong. At least in the short term, there has been no end to history as anyone in the U.S. military will easily attest.

In another way, Fukuyama overshot the real end of history; by some centuries. History ended on Easter Sunday morning some two thousand years ago. The ultimate war between God and sinners has been pronounced over by the decisive act of the resurrection of God's Son from the dead. God's enemies vanquished lie as Christ the Victor surges forth from a tomb of death that could not hold Him. Your sin lies in the tomb: "See where he was laid!" says the angel to the women. "Go ahead, look! What do you see there? Only the left-overs of death: the detritus of burial, spices to reduce the smell of decay scattered over the floor of the tomb. No such smell ever arose from the body of God's Son. His Father had promised Him: "You will not abandon my soul to Sheol, or let your holy one see corruption" (Ps 16:10). Neither death nor its decay could grasp Him. He suffered not the rigors of death. His body, suffused with divinity could not become stiffened with one eye open, the other shut, His mouth gaping distorted to one side in agony, arms stretched out to embrace death upon the accursed tree. No, His Father promised Him that His death would not have those awful signs of putrefaction that ours does. Even in death, He was filled with joy for the work He accomplished. The entombed Lord exults: "My whole being rejoices; my flesh also dwells secure" (Psalm 16:9).

History's object is death. There is no end to that history. Everyone has a date with death. As Civil War general and President Ulysses S. Grant was dying, he was trying to finish his memoirs. He wrote to his doctor: 'With every word I had been adding to my book and to my coffin.'" The death of political figures is the staccato flow of historical reality: President Lincoln is assassinated, Napoleon Bonaparte perhaps poisoned, Gustavus Adolphus dead upon the battle field, Adolf Hitler thrown into a shallow ditch and burned. Thousands upon thousands slaughtered under their leadership, bodies strewn from Stalingrad to Gettysburg; millions suffering the rigor mortis of a wretched death: frozen in time, to become merely gruesome Matthew-Brady-photographs from a field turned from glory to slaughter.