Prophet and President John Taylor wrote: Jesus had to take away sin by the sacrifice of Himself, the just for the unjust. . . . And as He in His own person bore the sins of all, and atoned for them by the sacrifice of Himself, so there came upon Him the weight and agony of ages and generations, the indescribable agony consequent upon this great sacrificial atonement wherein He bore the sins of the world. . . . Hence His profound grief, His indescribable anguish, His overpowering torture, all experienced in the submission to the eternal fiat of Jehovah and the requirements of an inexorable law.
. . . In making an atonement for the sins of the world, He bore the weight, the responsibility, and the burden of the sins of all, which, to us is incomprehensible. As stated, “the Lord, your Redeemer, suffered death in the flesh; wherefore he suffered the pains of all:” and Isaiah says: “Surely he hath borne our griefs and carried our sorrows,” also, “The Lord hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all,” . . . or as it is written in the Second Book of Nephi: “For behold, He suffereth the pains of all; yea the pains of every living creature, both men, women and children, who belong to the family of Adam.” . . .
Groaning beneath this concentrated load, this intense, incomprehensible pressure, this terrible exaction of Divine justice from which feeble humanity shrank, and through the agony thus experienced sweating great drops of blood, He was led to exclaim, “Father, if it be possible, let this cup pass from me.” He had wrestled with the superincumbent load in the wilderness, He had struggled against the powers of darkness that had been let loose upon Him there; placed below all things, His mind super charge with agony and pain, lonely and apparently helpless and forsaken, in His agony blood oozed from His pores. Thus rejected by His own, attacked by the powers of darkness, and seemingly forsaken by His God, on the cross he bowed beneath the accumulated load, and cried out in anguish, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me!”
