Crossing the Line to Infinite

I was flipping through my roommate's book, The Gift of the Atonement, just now while eating my cereal, and I came across this entry. I know I need a reminder from time to time of just how amazing Christ's sacrifice was, so I thought I would share:

The suffering of Jesus Christ in the Garden and on the cross exceeded the combined suffering of all human beings. The suffering of Jesus was not just tough pain and a bad death, it was not just the most painful of all human experiences and deaths. The suffering of Christ was cumulative; it was in fact infinite. When Christ descended below all things, he crossed the line from the finite, that which can be measured, to the infinite. And as his suffering was infinite, so now is his glory infinite, and infinite also is his power to save. . . . "Therefore there can be nothing which is short of an infinite atonement which will suffice for the sins of the world" (Alma 34:12; see also 2 Nephi 25:16; Alma 34:10, 14; D&C 19:10-19).

Human nature makes us want to quantify, to measure the atonement of Christ, but his ordeal is off any scale; it is beyond our comprehension. Jesus bore not just the sins of the world, but the sorrows, pains, and sicknesses of the world as well . . . (See Alma 7:11-12). . . .

All the negative aspects of human existence brought about by the Fall, Jesus Christ absorbed into himself. He experienced vicariously in Gethsemane all the private griefs and heartaches, all the physical pains and handicaps, all the emotional burdens and depressions of the human family. He knows the loneliness of those who don't fit in or who aren't handsome or pretty. He knows what it's like to choose up teams and be the last one chosen. He knows the angusish of parents whose children go wrong. He knows the private hell of the abused child or spouse. He knows all these things personally and intimately because he lived them in the Gethsemane experience. Having personally lived a perfect life, he then chose to experience our imperfect lives. In that infinite Gethsemane experience, the meridian of time, the center of eternity, he lived a billion billion lifetimes of sin, pain, disease, and sorrow.

God uses no magic wand to simply wave bad things into nonexistence. The sins that he remits, he remits by making them his own and suffering them. The pain and heartaches that he relieves, he relieves by suffering them himself. These things can be shared and absorbed, but they cannot be simply wished or waved away. They must be suffered. Thus we owe him not only for our spiritual cleaning from sin, but for our physical, mental, and emotional healings as well, for he has borne these infirmities for us also. All that the Fall put wrong, the Savior in his atonement puts right. It is all part of his infinite sacrifice - of his infinite gift.

- Stephen E. Robinson