As promised, here’s some of what I found and thought on the issue of atonement:
Paul E. Little in Know What You Believe says “atonement means, “at-one-ment”–that is to say, a bringing together of those who are estranged.” He concedes that in the Old Testament, atonement referred more to a covering. The covering for sin provided under the sacrificial system would suffice until the death of Christ. In the New Testament, Little says that atonement encompasses several ideas, namely reconciliation (as mentioned in Romans 5:10), and appeasement or propitiation–“the removal of wrath by the offering of a gift.” (See Romans 3:25).
According to Grudem in his Systematic Theology, two aspects of the character of God are at work in the atonement: His love and His justice. The love we see explained in John 3:16 and the justice we find in verses such as Romans 3:25. Grudem says, “the love and the justice of God were the ultimate cause of the atonement. . . . without the love of God, he would never have taken any steps to redeem us, yet without the justice of God, the specific requirement that Christ should earn our salvation by dying for our sins would not have been met. Both the love and the justice of God were equally important.”
For me, atonement brings to mind imagery of the Old Testament, blood filling the Kidron Valley at Passover and other high holidays as it flowed from the Temple, from the sacrifices killed one after the other on the bronze altar in the court yard–the blood flowed out of the animal and met the sin of the offeror. God had established the blood as a means to cover the offeror’s sin. It was His law.
So it was with Jesus, with His blood on the cross. His blood met my sin–it satisfied the debt my sin represented in the economy of God. It was a permanent solution to my sin problem.
Perhaps a hymn by William Cowper can best express the idea:
There is a fountain filled with blood
Drawn from Immanuel’s veins,
And sinners plunged beneath that flood
Lose all their guilty stains
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Rooted and Grounded 