What if history has no point?  What if, as the nineteenth century German historian Jacob Burkhardt suggested, history is nothing more than human struggle, the struggle of human beings for power and place in a world of time and passage which they, according to Burkhardt, will never really understand?
     It is difficult, however, to live as if our lives and the histories that flow out of them, have no point.  We all want to believe that what we do has meaning.  But just what is history's ultimate point?
     When the Mede-Persian king Cyrus proclaimed, in the sixth century B.C., that the Jews living in captivity in Babylon could return to Palestine, he did so because he recognized that over and beyond him was God, and that this God was working in history with love, reason, and purpose.  Cyrus knew that although he was a mighty king who had conquered a great deal of the known world, he was ultimately a very minor player in a much bigger drama:  the love of God.
     Cyrus was wiser than he realized.  The love of God is indeed history's ultimate point.  It is the love of God that impelled the creation of the world, it is the love of God that enabled the emergence of humanity, it is the love of God that birthed the fact of you and me.  It is the love of God that drives time, and it is the love of God that drives history.  Indeed, it is God's love, a love that loves regardless of form or circumstance, that makes our lives worth living, our world and its histories worth pondering.  Without God's love, history would not be. 
     And that's the point.