Suffering Pains and Afflictions

Alma taught the people of Gideon that Christ would “go forth, suffering pains and afflictions and temptations of every kind” in order to “take upon him the pains and the sicknesses of his people” (Alma 7:11).  I’ve always thought of this as a reference only to the two days in which He performed the atonement, but I think it is even broader than that.  Surely He had great sufferings during His mortal life before that last week which enabled Him to understand first-hand the difficulties of mortality.  The angel told King Benjamin that He would suffer “temptation, and pain of body, hunger, thirst, and fatigue, even more than man can suffer, except it be unto death” and I think we see much of that in the Gospels (Mosiah 3:7).  We know for sure that He did have temptations, the most well-known of which happened at the beginning of His ministry when Satan tried three times to tempt Him.  At the end of that experience Luke records this phrase: “When the devil had ended all the temptation, he departed from him for a season”, clearly implying that there would be more temptations the Savior would be called upon to endure (Luke 4:13).  In terms of hunger and thirst, we know that He fasted for forty days, which would have killed any normal man.  We can only imagine what it would feel like to be forty times as hungry as when we fast for a day.  Christ must have also experienced great fatigue in all of His travels and the endless throngs of people that tried to get His attention.  We get a sense of this in the account of the great storm that the disciples encountered on a ship.  It was so bad that “the waves beat unto the ship, so that it was now full.”  But Jesus was “in the hinder part of the ship, asleep on a pillow” through it all and they had to awaken Him to get His attention (Mark 4:37-38).  To be able to sleep through that kind of storm indicates that He must have been utterly exhausted.   Also as Elder Holland pointed out in this last general conference, Christ suggested that at least during part of His ministry He was quite literally homeless: “The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath not where to lay his head” (Matt 8:20).  All of this shows that He not only suffered infinitely at the end of His ministry in the experience of the atonement, but He suffered throughout His life and ministry so that He would “know according the flesh how to succor his people” (Alma 7:12).