Easter thoughts

I was recently studying from an online manual for the LDS Doctrine & Covenants, and found these quotes to be quite striking in the way that they describe some of what Jesus Christ must have endured through the process of suffering for our sins-physically, mentally, and spiritually-receiving all consequences on our behalf, feeling our pain and anguish, and then conquering it all upon His Resurrection...in other words, "the Atonement."  

Such a miracle to realize the depths that he descended below for all of us, willingly, and to rise above it all...defeating death, sickness, pain, and suffering, so that we could return to live with our Father in Heaven and purify our hearts by accepting his miraculous gift.  I am ever so grateful for that opportunity.  To know that I can be forgiven.  To know that through Him, I can overcome anything that life throws at me.  That no one is ever "too far gone."  That we all are precious to Him.  I can bear witness of the reality of that love, as I have felt it personally in my life.  Happy (late) Easter to all.

Speaking of the extent of the suffering required of Christ, President Joseph Fielding Smith said:

“We cannot comprehend the great suffering that the Lord had to take upon himself to bring to pass this redemption from death and from sin. …

“We get into the habit of thinking, I suppose, that his great suffering was when he was nailed to the cross by his hands and his feet and was left there to suffer until he died. As excruciating as that pain was, that was not the greatest suffering that he had to undergo, for in some way which I cannot understand, but which I accept on faith, and which you must accept on faith, he carried on his back the burden of the sins of the whole world. It is hard enough for me to carry my own sins. How is it with you? And yet he had to carry the sins of the whole world, as our Savior and the Redeemer of a fallen world, and so great was his suffering before he ever went to the cross, we are informed, that blood oozed from the pores of his body.” (In Conference Report, Oct. 1947, pp. 147–48.)

Similarly, Elder James E. Talmage wrote:

“Christ’s agony in the garden is unfathomable by the finite mind, both as to intensity and cause. … He struggled and groaned under a burden such as no other being who has lived on earth might even conceive as possible. It was not physical pain, nor mental anguish alone, that caused Him to suffer such torture as to produce an extrusion of blood from every pore; but a spiritual agony of soul such as only God was capable of experiencing. No other man, however great his powers of physical or mental endurance, could have suffered so; for his human organism would have succumbed, and syncope would have produced unconsciousness and welcome oblivion. In that hour of anguish Christ met and overcame all the horrors that Satan, ‘the prince of this world’ could inflict. …

“In some manner, actual and terribly real though to man incomprehensible, the Savior took upon Himself the burden of the sins of mankind from Adam to the end of the world.” (Jesus the Christ, p. 613.)