Dear Mom,

I hope you and dad are doing well. How were the holidays? We had a quiet one this year—just us and Casey sprawled on the couch afterward while we put on a movie. I don’t even remember what we watched, but I found myself thinking about how stories end. You know that feeling when a movie wraps up and everything lands right? There’s something in us that longs for that—a resolution where the struggle was worth it.

That got me thinking about a bigger story. The Bible tells us history itself has an ending, and it doesn’t end in defeat or escape. It ends in Christ’s triumph.

Paul says, “Then comes the end, when he delivers the kingdom to God the Father after destroying every rule and every authority and power. For he must reign until he has put all his enemies under his feet. The last enemy to be destroyed is death” (1 Cor. 15:24–26). Christ is reigning now, subduing His enemies, and one day He will return—not to begin His victory, but to complete it.

Revelation gives us this vision: “The kingdom of the world has become the kingdom of our Lord and of his Christ, and he shall reign forever and ever” (Rev. 11:15). And Psalm 22 declares: “All the ends of the earth shall remember and turn to the Lord, and all the families of the nations shall worship before you” (Ps. 22:27).

You know, one thing I’ve noticed is that the churches we grew up in rarely taught church history. I used to think that was just a time issue—so much Bible to cover, who has time for old theologians? But the more I’ve studied, the more I wonder if there’s another reason. When you actually read the early church fathers, you find that what we were taught as “the biblical view” didn’t exist until the 1830s when a man named John Nelson Darby invented it. Before Darby, no one in church history taught a pretribulation rapture or the kind of escape-and-collapse eschatology we inherited.

Irenaeus, for example, was a pastor in the 2nd century—trained by Polycarp, who knew the Apostle John personally. He wrote: “Christ shall come at the end of time, when He has subdued all His enemies and given life to all who follow Him.” From the earliest days, the church saw history ending not in failure, but in Christ’s victory. That’s not a new idea—it’s the old one. The escape theology is what’s new.

Mom, this is where my hope lies. Not in escape from tribulation, but in Christ’s triumph over it. Not in retreat, but in advance. When He returns, He will not find His Bride hiding in fear, but shining in glory, made ready for the wedding feast.

That’s the ending I long for both of us to hold onto. Christ wins. And in Him, we win too.

With love, Your son

Passages to read together:

• 1 Corinthians 15:24–26
• Revelation 11:15
• Psalm 22:27
• Philippians 2:9–11