George Smeaton has a beautiful section in his work, “Christ’s Doctrine of the Atonement” on how the atonement denudes Satan of his power. He suggests that in the atonement, Christ merited the right to His current rule of the world of mankind as the God-man, as well as the right to subdue Satan’s reign. I’ll just quote one lovely section in which Smeaton makes this case,
It is further said, ‘the prince of this world shall be cast out.’ This follows as the legitimate result of that judicial process which has adjudged the world to Christ. Satan is to be cast out of the world; and in due time bound in chains, to the judgment of the great day. He is not, even at the present, lord de jure of one foot of earth; but his usurpation lingers, and is permitted to continue, on many accounts, in to which it is not our present business to inquire. He is to be ejected, in point of fact as well as right, to exercise no more power or authority either over single men or communities of men, by means of any of those systems on which he has expended, for centuries, the utmost refinement of his subtlety. These shall melt away like the mists of the morning. But even now the church has, on the ground of Christ’s atonement, to go in and take possession of the world from which its prince has been legally cast out, and from which he will ere long, in point of fact, be fully ejected.
George Smeaton, Christ’s Doctrine of the Atonement, p. 312
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