Fourth, the atonement of Jesus Christ is infinite because Christ himself is an infinite being. From his mother, Mary—a mortal woman—he inherited mortality, the capacity to die. On the other hand, he inherited from his Father, the Almighty Elohim, immortality, the power to live forever.
The suffering and sacrifice in Gethsemane and on Golgotha were undertaken by a being who was greater than man, one possessing the powers of a God. This was no human sacrifice, nor even simply an act of a wise and all-loving teacher. It was more, infinitely more, than an example of submission or a model of humanitarianism. He did for us what no other being could do.
Yes, it is true that “there was no other good enough to pay the price of sin. He only could unlock the gate of heav’n and let us in.” (“There Is a Green Hill Far Away,” Hymns, no. 194.)
But it is equally true that what Jesus of Nazareth accomplished in and through the awful atonement is beyond human comprehension; it is the work of an infinite personage. Indeed, as Amulek later proclaimed,
“There is not any man [meaning a man subject to the perils of death] that can sacrifice his own blood which will atone for the sins of another.... Therefore,” he concluded, “there can be nothing which is short of an infinite atonement which will suffice for the sins of the world,” even a great and last sacrifice to be undertaken by “the Son of God, yea, infinite and eternal.” (Alma 34:11-12, 14.)
“He Suffereth the Pains of All Men Yea, the Pains of Every Living Creature”
Elder James E. Talmage, in an attempt to describe the awfulness of the atoning hours in Gethsemane, has written: “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.... 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 )