I’m an aspiring philosopher and Christian apologist. DM me for deep conversations.
I hold quite controversial beliefs among Christians, but nevertheless Christ’s atonement was the greatest display of love.
Christ died, but that wasn’t the worst part that happened to him. Imagine your closest friends, your mother, your father, your brother, those who you have led and those who have led you and all those people who have helped you and stuck by your side when it’s been bad. Imagine those whom you admire. Now imagine all the rest who love you. Now image if one of them simply ditched you for some quick money. Not only did they ditch you, but they unjustly testified against you in court. That would hurt, wouldn’t it? Imagine the others who you previously identified not testifying for you because they were threatened to be hurt if they did. Your brother, mother, father, mentor, mentored, therapist, youth pastor, and your closest friends refused to help you because they were scared.
That’s the pain Jesus went through.

Oh but wait! That’s only a small fraction - you have to remember the worst physical pain you’ve ever experienced. Do you know how much more pain Jesus went through? Much more. There was a form of death that was previously discarded by the Romans before the cross because it wasn’t painful enough. That method was dropping you onto a sharpened wooden stake and letting you stay there until you die, slowly. The stake wasn’t smooth. That method wasn’t as painful as crucifixion.
Have you ever been beaten, punched, whipped, or hit even once? That hurts right? Now imagine that happening multiple times in a row, for hours, except that the whip has glass shards in it, and the people hitting you are trained guards.

Do you have back pain? If so, great, you were just kicked and beaten and whipped on the back for hours at a time on your back. Now you have to carry a 150 lb (68kg) wooden, not smooth beam for a long time to and up a hill. You’ve collapsed from exhaustion and pain because of it.

When you got to the top of a hill, you were forced to stay on the beam, and they nailed another wooden beam on it in the shape of a cross. Your bloodied arm is sat on by guards. Has anything been impaled into you? Great, now make that impalement at the location of just below your wrist, and make the thing that impaled you a thick steel nail, like a nail they used to hammer railroads, and it goes all the way through. This will impale your midian nerve, which will be incredibly excruciating. Then repeat the process on your other wrist, and every struggle you make has been tearing at your other implanted wrist, furthering the pain. They’ve finished with nailing the nail in that wrist now. Don’t forget that your back is open, raw, and bleeding against the wood still.
They start to pull your legs together onto the bottom of the beam, and they hold your feet together. Every struggle you make only amplifies the pain. They now start to put a nail at your feet. You can’t think the pain could get any worse, except now just above the start of your foot they strike the hammer onto the nail into your leg, until it goes through the first foot. Now, they’re getting the other foot just below your impaled one, and they hammer the nail from your already impaled foot into your other one. After that, they finish nailing both into the wooden beam.

Ah but you can’t be let off that easy! Now, they’re putting the beam upright, so that your raw back is scraping against the wood and the nails in your wrists and feet are the things holding you up. Since you’re hanging like that, it’s making it hard to breathe. If you push up to try to breathe, you’re putting even more force against the nail that supports you. Eventually you will either lose the will to live or you’ll become too exhausted to even be able to push up against the force of your own weight, and the nails will be pushing on your nerves until you die, of asphyxiation.

However, that’s not even the end of the pain. All that time, since it’s a public gathering, those people you mentioned earlier are there, watching you die in that manner. They’re too scared to cause an uprising. Your mother, father, brother, sister, wife, husband, son, daughter, best friend, mentor, mentored, loved, and loving all watch you die, without trying to stop it.
It’s the most pain you’ve ever experienced in your life, except it’s not over. You might think your God or your religion can give you comfort, but they can’t. Your God, who you’ve vividly experienced before, abandons you, to punish you. Except that your God has promised he’s loved you beyond comparison. Except pretend that you aren’t that person t being punished anymore. Pretend you’re their son or daughter, and that you watched them get accused and convicted, and you fled. Pretend you testified against him. Pretend you watched him get beat. Pretend you watched him get nailed. Pretend you heard his screams of pain. Pretend that, through all this time, you’ve don’t nothing but harm him even more. Now imagine that you testified against him because you were scared that you would be hurt if you were accused.
Now imagine, that he survived by a miracle, and says he would do it a million times over again just so you wouldn’t have to experience that pain just once.

Please don’t forget, the pain I described above is only a fraction of what Jesus truly experienced. He went through the full pain of God’s divine wrath just so you didn’t have to get the smallest taste of it.

Lincoy3304