Incarnation and Atonement

Christians commonly associate Jesus' work of atonement with His crucifixion, but a truly scriptural understanding of atonement shows that the phenomenon of incarnation was actually the essential substance of God's atoning work in His Son. For it was there, in the intimate being-to-being union of God and man in Mary's womb, that divine-human reconciliation was achieved in essence. That reconciliation was then worked out and perfected in the living communion of Father and Son, finally being universalized in Jesus' substitutionary death at Calvary.