How willing are you to forgive your brother? How much do you desire
peace instead of endless strife and misery and pain? These questions are
the same, in different form. Forgiveness IS your peace, for herein lies
the end of separation, and the dream of danger and destruction, sin and
death; of madness and of murder, grief and loss. This is the “sacrifice”
salvation asks, and gladly offers peace instead of this.

Swear not to die, you holy Son of God! You make a bargain that you
cannot keep. The Son of Life cannot be killed. He is immortal as his
Father. What he is cannot be changed. He is the only thing in all the
universe that MUST be one. What seems eternal all will have an end. The
stars will disappear, and night and day will be no more. All things that
come and go, the tides, the seasons, and the lives of man; all things
that change with time, and bloom and fade, will not return. Where time
has set an end is not where the eternal is. God’s Son can never change
by what man made of him. He will be as he was and as he is, for time
appointed not his destiny, nor set the hour of his birth and death.
Forgiveness will not change him. Yet time waits upon forgiveness that
the things of time may disappear because they have no use.

Nothing survives its purpose. If it be conceived to die, then die it
must unless it does not take this purpose as its own. Change is the only
thing that can be made a blessing here, where purpose is not fixed,
however changeless it appears to be. Think not that you can set a goal
unlike God’s purpose for you, and establish it as changeless and
eternal. You can give yourself a purpose that you do not have. But you
can NOT remove the power to change your mind, and see another purpose
there. Change is the greatest gift God gave to all that you would make
eternal, to ensure that only Heaven would not pass away.

You were not born to die. You cannot change, because your function has
been fixed by God. All other goals are set in time and change that time
might be preserved, excepting ONE. Forgiveness does not aim at keeping
time, but at its ending, when it has no use. Its purpose ended, it is
gone. And where it once held seeming sway is now restored the function
God established for His Son in full awareness. Time can set no end to
its fulfillment, nor its changelessness. There is no death because the
living share the function their Creator gave to them. Life’s function
cannot be to die. It must be life’s extension, that it be as one forever
and forever, without end.

This world will bind your feet and tie your hands and kill your body
only if you think that it was made to crucify God’s Son. For even though
it was a dream of death, you need not let it stand for this to you. Let
THIS be changed, and nothing in the world but must be changed as well.
For nothing here but is defined as what you see it for. How lovely is
the world whose purpose is forgiveness of God’s Son! How free from fear,
how filled with blessing and with happiness! And what a joyous thing it
is to dwell a little while in such a happy place! Nor can it be forgot,
in such a world, it IS a little while till timelessness comes quietly to
take the place of time.