Welcome to Defenders, the teaching class of Dr. William Lane Craig.

Today, the Doctrine of Salvation, Part 6.

For more information and resources from Dr. Craig, go to reasonablefaith.org.

Today we're going to start a new subsection on the Doctrine of Salvation on our mystical

union with Christ.

I think that this lesson will be a real encouragement to every regenerate believer.

In speaking of our mystical union with Christ, we're not talking about the total absorption of the believer in the deity,

such as you have in pantheistic religions, for example, Buddhism, where at death, like a drop

returning to the ocean, so the individual returns to the all or the totality

of being. And as a result really ceases to exist as an individual thing. We're not talking

about that sort of mystical union, such as you find in pantheism. Rather, we're talking about the wonder of a

personal relationship and identification of the regenerate believer with Jesus Christ. It's rather

like the marriage relationship that Paul describes in Ephesians Chapter 5,

where he says that the man and the woman become one flesh, and yet they still exist as two individual persons.

It's not as though they somehow merge into one person. They are two distinct

persons, but they are so closely united that they become identified with one another as a unit.

I think that the notion of our union with Christ is the primary meaning of the popular

phrase having a personal relationship with God. When we say that in coming to know Christ,

you come into a personal relationship with God. We're not speaking

primarily of the subjective experience of fellowship with God. Some people who don't have that

sort of intimate fellowship with God, or who have their Christian

experience come and go as emotions, wax, and wane, or as times change, will sometimes

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