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

Today, the Doctrine of Christ, part 24.

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

Today we're going to wrap up our long series on the doctrine of the atonement. But before we turn to our new subject for today,

I want to just say a final word concerning the satisfaction of divine justice that we closed with last time.

You remember, I said that on the analysis of the French Swiss theologian

Francois Touritin, that the punishment suffered by Christ was God the Father's withdrawing from

him the beatific vision of God and suspending the joy and the comfort

and the sense and fellowship of the full felicity of communion with God.

And it's important to understand that although Christ suffers this as a divine person,

he does so in his human nature, not in his divine nature. It is Jesus Christ, the man,

who makes atonement for our sin and who becomes our sin bearer and bears the

punishment for our sin, and hence the necessity of the incarnation. Hebrews chapter 2 verses 14 to 15 says,

since therefore the children, that's us, share in flesh and blood, he himself likewise

partook of the same nature, that through death he might destroy him who has the power

of death, that is the devil, and deliver all those who through fear of death

were subject to lifelong bondage. So it is in his humanity and that common human nature

that Christ shares with us that he experiences death and the rupture of fellowship with God, the Father,

on the cross, thereby bearing our punishment. And I think that this understanding of Christ's

punishment fits in very nicely with the model of the incarnation that I laid out in the

previous section in this Defender's class. You remember when we talked about the incarnation,

I offered a model of the incarnation according to which the divine aspects of the second person of the Trinity,

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