Tad R. Callister wrote: The Savior’s plunge into humanity was not a toe-dipping experience. It was total immersion. He did not experience some pains and not others. His life was not a random sampling, a spot audit; it was total confrontation with and internalization of every human experience, every human plight, every human trial. Somehow his sponge alone would absorb the entire ocean of human affliction, weakness and suffering. For this descent he would fully bare his human breast. There would be no godly powers exercised that would shield him from one scintilla of human pain. . . .
Christ’s Atonement was a descent into the seemingly “bottomless pit” of human agony. He took upon himself the sins of the most wretched of all sinners; he descended below the most wretched of all sinners; he descended beneath the cruelest tortures devised man. His downward journey encompassed the transgressions of those who ignorantly sinned; it incorporated that quantum of suffering unrelated to spiritual error, but none-the-less viably acute in stinging proportions—the agony of loneliness, the pain of inadequacy, the suffering of infirmities and sickness. In the course of his divine descent he was assaulted with every temptation inflicted upon the human race.
After our futile attempts to explain the awesome depths of this “terrible trip,” we come back to those simple but expressive words of the scriptures, “He descended below all things” (Doctrine and Covenants 88:6).~”The Gift of the Atonement” (Salt Lake City: Deseret Book, 2002). p.22
