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If you have Catholic background then you should not be adverse to reading what Pope Benedict XVI had to say, forty years ago, about the matter in his "Introduction to Christianity."(p. 214)

Almost all religions center around the idea of expiation. They arise out of man's knowledge of his guilt before God and signify his attempt to remove this feeling of guilt, to surmount the guilt through conciliatory actions offered up to God. ....

In the New Testament the situation is almost completely reversed. It is not man who goes to God with a compensatory gift, but God who comes to man, in oder to give it to him. He restore disturbed right on the iniative of his own power to love, by making unjust man just again, the dead living again, through his own creative mercy. His righteousness is grace; it is active righteousness, which sets crooked man right, that is, bends him straight, makes him right. ....The New Testament does not say that men conciliate God, as we really ought to expect, since it is they who have failed, not God. It says on the contrary, "God was in Christ reconciling the world to himself. ... God does not wait until the guilty come to be reconciled; he gos out to meet them and reconciles them. Here we see the true direction of the incarnation, the cross.