How Did Jesus Christ Bear Our Griefs and Sorrows?

             My Come, Follow Me studies for this week took me to Isaiah 50-57 and a lesson titled “He Hath Borne Our Griefs, and Carried Our Sorrows.” The lesson was introduced by the following information: 

Throughout his ministry, Isaiah spoke of a mighty deliverer (see, for example, Isaiah 9:3-7). These prophecies would have been especially precious to the Israelites centuries later when they were in captivity in Babylon. Someone who could topple the walls of Babylon would be a mighty conqueror indeed. But that isn’t the kind of Messiah that Isaiah described in chapters 52-53: “He is despised and rejected of men; a man of sorrows, and acquainted with grief: and we hid as it were our faces from him. … We did esteem him stricken, smitten of God, and afflicted” (Isaiah 53:3-4). By sending such an unexpected deliverer, God taught us about true deliverance. To save us from oppression and affliction, God sent One who Himself “was oppressed, and … afflicted.” Where some expected a lion, He sent a lamb (see Isaiah 53:7). Surely, God’s ways are not our ways (see Isaiah 55:8-9). Jesus Christ frees us not by just opening the prison but by taking our place there. He relieves us from our chains of grief and sorrow by bearing them Himself (see Isaiah 53:4-5, 12). He does not save us from a distance. He suffers with us, in an act of “everlasting kindness” that “shall not depart from thee” (Isaiah 54:8, 10).

            As usual, this scripture block taught numerous principles, and I chose to discuss the following principle taught in Isaiah 53 “Jesus Christ took upon Himself sins and sorrows of all mankind.” The lesson material said that Isaiah 53 the redemptive mission of Jesus Christ “more beautifully” that most other scriptures. The chapter listed “griefs,” “sorrows,” and “transgressions” that the Savior sorrowed for you and I and all mankind.

            Jesus Christ suffered and died for men’s transgressions. We do not know many details about Christ’s crucifixion, but this quote from Elder James E. Talmage discusses the specifics that are known.

“But few details of the actual crucifixion are given us. We know however that our Lord was nailed to the cross by spikes driven through the hands and feet, as was the Roman method, and not bound only by cords as was the custom in inflicting this form of punishment among some other nations. Death by crucifixion was at once the most lingering and most painful of all forms of execution. The victim lived in ever-increasing torture, generally for many hours, sometimes for days. The spikes so cruelly driven through hands and feet penetrated and crushed sensitive nerves and quivering tendons, yet inflicted no mortal wound. The welcome relief of death came through the exhaustion caused by intense and unremitting pain, through localized inflammation and congestion of organs incident to the strained and unnatural posture of the body.” (Jesus the Christ, p. 655).

            The scriptures tell us that it was not just on the cross that Christ suffered. He began His Atonement in the Garden of Gethsemane where He took the sins of the world upon Himself to bear our griefs and carry our sorrows. (See Isaiah 53:4.) Elder Talmage wrote the following about Christ’s suffering and pain.

Christ’s agony in the garden is unfathomable by the finite mind, both as to intensity and cause. The thought that He suffered through fear of death is untenable. Death to Him was preliminary to resurrection and triumphal return to the Father from whom He had come, and to a state of glory even beyond what He had before possessed; and, moreover, it was within His power to lay down His life voluntarily. 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. The frightful struggle incident to the temptations immediately following the Lord’s baptism was surpassed and overshadowed by this supreme contest with the powers of evil.

In some manner, actual and terribly real though to man incomprehensible, the Savior took upon Himself the burden of the sins of mankind from dm to the end of the world. Modern revelation assists us to a partial understanding of the awful experience. In March 1830, the glorified Lord, Jesus Christ, thus spake: “For behold, I, God, have suffered these things for all, that they might not suffer if they would repent, but if they would not repent, they must suffer even as I, which suffering caused myself, even God, the greatest of all, to tremble because of pain, and to bleed at every pore, and to suffer both body and spirit: and would that I might not drink the bitter cup and shrink – nevertheless, glory be to the Father, and I partook and finished my preparations unto the children of men.” (Jesus the Christ, pp. 613-14.)

            The Savior was totally innocent of sin, but He vicariously took upon Him the responsibility for myriads of guilty people. This is why Isaiah wrote, “He hath borne our griefs, and carried our sorrows” and “was wounded for our transgressions, [and] bruised for our iniquities” (Isaiah 53:4-5).