Hi Spike,
Thanks for taking the time to respond.

The sickening nature of the atonement sacrifice is a feature, not a bug.

Imagine being an Old Testament believer. You take a lamb as a sacrifice to the Tabernacle. To atone for your sin, you have to watch that lamb get slaughtered — the terror in its eyes, hear its bleating as it dies, watch its blood pour out, see every gruesome detail of its death.

You know that death is the death you deserved for what you did. You know you’re guilty. That’s why you brought the sacrifice. You see your death played out before your eyes as this innocent lamb suffers.

Now: do you leave that sacrifice and go sin wantonly?

Or do you take serious stock of your life and do everything you can to avoid ever seeing that again?

Do you take your sin more seriously, or less?

You can see the point, here.

It’s a gruesome, visual, audible, personal, unavoidable experience of how awful your sin is.

And remember who the greatest victim of your sin is: yourself. The Bible speaks of sin as storing up wrath against yourself. Isaiah experiences this viscerally when God brings him to Heaven in Isaiah 6, and Isaiah is in agony because of his sin. God isn’t torturing him. God isn’t pouring out wrath against him. Isaiah only feels the sins he chose to commit, and it’s the worst agony he’s ever experienced.

The atoning sacrifice saves you from the agony your own sins would cause you, if you entered eternity with their wrath still stored up against you.

The gruesome nature of the sacrifice helps you see how serious it is now, so that you put all your effort into living well, loving richly, caring for all those around you, and all the other things God tells you to do, instead of doing their opposite. Every time you remember the horrors of the sacrifice, it compels you to obey God’s life-giving commands, so that you never again see the horrors of that death played out for you.