Thursday, January 12, 2023

Glenn L. Pearson and Reid E. Bankhead on the Centrality of the Cross in the Atonement

  

The nature of the atonement. In King Benjamin’s great sermon—and elsewhere in the Book of Mormon—we are brought to the realization that Jesus’ atonement was an expiatory act of a divine being. His agony in Gethsemane for our sins caused him to bleed at every port. As he hung from the cross, his heart was broken, his spirit fled, he was offered as the last sacrifice, the spear of a heathen soldier doing service for the sacrificial knife. We are brought with his blood if we will plead for him to pay the price. (Glenn L. Pearson and Reid E. Bankhead, Doctrinal Approach to the Book of Mormon [Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1962], 6)