title: “The Kingdom Without the Cross: On the Claim That Satan Is Not Opposed to Good Morals” author: “Thomas Lee Abshier, ND” date: 2026-11-01 module: CFE secondary_modules: [CWR] type: essay status: FIRST_DRAFT source: “An anonymous post originating on X and reshared on Facebook, beginning ‘Satan is not opposed to good morals. He’s opposed to Jesus Christ.’ Seen 1 November 2026.” engages: “A widely shared devotional post arguing that Satan’s chief strategy is morality without Christ: that good people who reject Jesus are lost, that the Pharisees were moral yet condemned, that morality does not save but Jesus does (Ephesians 2:8-9), and that the only sin that damns is rejecting Christ (John 3:36).” topics: [salvation_by_grace, morality_and_salvation, self_righteousness, pharisees, temptation_in_the_wilderness, goods_without_the_cross, elder_brother_parable, cornelius, judgment_according_to_works, unbelief_as_the_sin_that_leaves_sin_unpaid, ephesians_2_10, cheap_grace, moralistic_therapeutic_deism, comparative_soteriology, conservation_of_moral_disorder, god_lives_our_experience, keeping_the_law_out_of_love, captives_to_rescue] scripture: [Matthew 16:23, Ephesians 2:8-10, Luke 18:11-14, Matthew 21:31, Isaiah 64:6, Luke 23:43, Matthew 4:3-9, 2 Corinthians 11:14-15, John 8:44, Job 1:9-11, Matthew 23:14, Matthew 23:23-25, Mark 7:9-13, John 8:31, John 8:40, Matthew 23:15, Romans 6:23, Ezekiel 18:20, Revelation 20:12, John 3:18, John 16:9, John 3:36, James 2:17, Matthew 7:21, Luke 6:46, Acts 10:2, Acts 10:4, Acts 11:14, Romans 2:14-15, Galatians 3:24, Matthew 5:6, Luke 15:28-31, Isaiah 63:9, Matthew 25:40, Acts 9:4, Genesis 6:6, Ephesians 4:30, Acts 17:28, John 14:15, John 14:6, Romans 10:3, Luke 7:47] prior_fellowship_essays_referenced:
- “Reconciliation of Man with the Father (25 July 2026)”
- “The Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men (18 April 2026)” changelog:
- “2026-11-01 v1.0 FIRST_DRAFT. Drafted by Claude at Thomas’s request from a Facebook post he received. Thesis of the post affirmed; five overreaches corrected in their stronger, precise form; the teaching that God lives our experience from inside placed at the center of the argument per Thomas’s 31 Oct 2026 direction. Post paraphrased except for its two-sentence opening; the person who reshared it is not named.”
The Kingdom Without the Cross:
On the Claim That Satan Is Not Opposed to Good Morals
Fellowship Essay | 1 November 2026
Get thee behind me, Satan: thou art an offence unto me: for thou savourest not the things that be of God, but those that be of men. — Matthew 16:23
Occasion. A post has been circulating on Facebook, reshared from X, under an arresting opening: “Satan is not opposed to good morals. He’s opposed to Jesus Christ.” The argument that follows is simple and forcefully put. Satan does not care whether you are kind, generous, disciplined, or respected; he cares that you do not bow the knee to Jesus. His great deception is to persuade people that being a good person is the same as being saved. The Pharisees were moral, yet they were condemned. The kind atheist, the compassionate Buddhist, the devout Muslim, and the churchgoer who pays his tithe and avoids scandal are all lost if they trust their goodness rather than Christ. Morality does not save; Jesus saves (Ephesians 2:8-9). The only sin that finally damns is rejecting the Son (John 3:36). The penitent murderer and the thief on the cross go in; the upright citizen who refused Christ does not. Stop trusting your morals, the post concludes, and start trusting Jesus.
A friend passed it along as a very good read. It is. I want to say plainly where I stand before I say anything else: I stand with the thesis of this post. Morality is not salvation, and the most effective counterfeit of the gospel is not vice but virtue offered as payment. But the post overreaches in several places, and in each case the precise, scriptural version of the claim is stronger than the loose version. A sermon that sharpens the conscience with a few false edges will cut the wrong things. So I want to take the post seriously enough to correct it — and then to go beneath it, to the question it raises and does not answer: why can goodness not pay? Why would a just God not accept a good life as sufficient?
I. What the Post Gets Right
Begin with the center, because it is true and it is urgently needed.
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast (Ephesians 2:8-9). The post quotes this correctly, and the clause that does the work is the last one: lest any man should boast. Salvation by works would leave a man with something to say for himself before God. Salvation by grace leaves him with nothing to say but thank you. That is not a technicality; it is the difference between a relationship founded on merit and one founded on love.
Jesus Himself drew the line exactly where the post draws it. Two men went up to the temple to pray. The Pharisee thanked God that he was not as other men are, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even as this publican; he fasted twice a week and tithed everything he possessed. The publican stood afar off, would not lift his eyes, and said only, God be merciful to me a sinner. Jesus’ verdict: this man went down to his house justified rather than the other (Luke 18:11-14). The Pharisee’s catalog of virtues was not a lie. It was simply beside the point — and worse than beside the point, because it was the thing that kept him from asking.
To the chief priests and elders Jesus said, the publicans and the harlots go into the kingdom of God before you (Matthew 21:31). Not because harlotry is better than respectability, but because the harlot knows she needs something and the respectable man does not. The thief on the cross had no record of good works and no time to compile one; he had only a request, and he received To day shalt thou be with me in paradise (Luke 23:43). Isaiah had already put the matter in its starkest form: all our righteousnesses are as filthy rags (Isaiah 64:6) — not our sins, our righteousnesses.
So the post is right that the decisive question is not “How good have I been?” but “Whom have I trusted?” Moral self-sufficiency is a peculiarly hard soil for the gospel. And it is right that much of the Western world — and much of the Western church — has quietly replaced the gospel with a folk religion in which good people go to heaven. The sociologist Christian Smith gave that folk religion a name after interviewing thousands of American teenagers: moralistic therapeutic deism — the belief that God exists, wants people to be nice, wants them to feel good about themselves, and admits the nice ones to heaven. That creed needs no Cross. The post is a fire alarm in a building where that creed is burning, and it should be heard.
II. The Adversary’s Program: Goods Without the Cross
The post’s most memorable line is also its least precise: that Satan is not opposed to good morals. Scripture does not let us say that. Jesus describes the devil as a murderer from the beginning and a liar, and the father of it (John 8:44). He comes to steal, kill, and destroy. He is no friend of the kindness, honesty, and fidelity that hold a family or a nation together; wherever vice will serve him, he uses vice, and the wreckage of addiction, betrayal, and violence is his signature as much as any self-righteous Pharisee.
But the post has seen something real, and Scripture shows it to us more sharply than the post does. Look at how Satan tempted Christ. He did not offer Jesus anything evil. He offered bread to a starving man; he offered a public demonstration of divine protection; he offered all the kingdoms of the world, and the glory of them (Matthew 4:3-9). Every one of these was a good. Jesus would feed multitudes, be vindicated by the Father, and receive the kingdoms of the world. What Satan offered was the good things without the Cross — the kingdom by a shortcut, on condition of a bow.
And when Peter, moments after confessing Jesus as the Christ, rebuked Him for speaking of His coming death, Jesus answered him with the words that stand at the head of this essay: Get thee behind me, Satan (Matthew 16:23). Peter wanted a good thing — he wanted his Master alive. But the good thing, purchased at the price of the Cross, was Satan’s thing. Paul says the same in another key: Satan himself is transformed into an angel of light. Therefore it is no great thing if his ministers also be transformed as the ministers of righteousness (2 Corinthians 11:14-15).
So here is the precise statement of what the post is reaching for. Satan is opposed to good morals and to Christ alike, but he will gladly spend morality to keep a man from Christ. He uses vice where vice works and virtue where virtue works. For the man who would never fall into the gutter, the gutter is not the trap; the pedestal is. Satan’s question about Job is instructive: Doth Job fear God for nought? (Job 1:9). He could not deny Job’s goodness, so he accused its motive — he insinuated that Job’s righteousness was a transaction, a wage paid for a hedge of protection. That is the devil’s theory of morality: that it is commerce. The man who trusts his goodness to save him has adopted the devil’s theory without knowing it.
III. Where the Post Overreaches — and Why the Precise Version Is Stronger
The Pharisees were not morally impeccable
The post says the Pharisees had impeccable morals and that Jesus condemned them not because their morals were bad. The Gospels say otherwise. Jesus told them they devour widows’ houses while making long prayers for show (Matthew 23:14). He told them they tithed garden herbs to the leaf and omitted the weightier matters of the law, judgment, mercy, and faith, and that they were clean outside and full of extortion and excess within (Matthew 23:23-25). He exposed their Corban rule, by which a man could declare his money dedicated to God and so escape the duty to support his aging parents — making the word of God of none effect through your tradition (Mark 7:9-13).
Two smaller corrections. The words Ye are of your father the devil (John 8:44) were spoken not to the Pharisees as a class but to those Jews which believed on him (John 8:31) who, a few verses later, were seeking to kill Him (John 8:40) — though Jesus did tell the scribes and Pharisees that they made each convert twofold more the child of hell than yourselves (Matthew 23:15), so the post’s point survives the correction. And the woman who washed Jesus’ feet with her tears is called in Scripture a woman in the city, which was a sinner (Luke 7:37); that she was a prostitute is a reasonable tradition, not the text.
Why does this matter? Because the precise version teaches something the loose version hides: self-righteousness corrupts morality itself. The Pharisees were not good men who happened to reject Christ. They were men whose righteousness had become a ledger, and a ledger always cheats on the hard entries. When goodness is currency, a man spends it where it shows — on mint and anise and cummin — and hoards it where it costs — on mercy to a widow, on support for an aged father. Their rejection of Christ and the rot in their morals were not two things. They were one thing seen from two sides. Trusting one’s own righteousness is not a moral position that happens to be theologically mistaken; it degrades the morality it trusts.
Every sin damns; unbelief is the sin that leaves the others unpaid
The post says the only sin that damns a man eternally is rejecting Jesus. I understand what it means, but as written it is not true, and the error has consequences. The wages of sin is death (Romans 6:23) — not the wages of unbelief. The soul that sinneth, it shall die (Ezekiel 18:20). The dead are judged every man according to their works (Revelation 20:12). Every sin carries its sentence.
What makes unbelief decisive is not that it is the only damning sin but that it is the sin that leaves all the other sins unanswered. He that believeth not is condemned already, because he hath not believed in the name of the only begotten Son of God (John 3:18). The Spirit convicts the world of sin, because they believe not on me (John 16:9). The sentence was already standing; Christ is the one remedy for it; to refuse the remedy is to remain under the sentence. The post’s own text, John 3:36, says exactly this: the wrath of God abideth on him — it abides, it remains, because it was there already.
Why insist on this? Because the loose version tells the moral man that his sins do not matter — that God is indifferent to cruelty and fraud and cares only about his opinion of Jesus. That is the very caricature the moral man already believes about Christianity, and it confirms him in his refusal. The precise version tells him the truth: your sins matter enormously; they matter so much that nothing you can do will pay them; and that is why you need Christ.
Read one more verse
The post stops at Ephesians 2:9. Paul does not. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them (Ephesians 2:10). Grace does not abolish good works; it relocates them. Before grace, works are a bid for acceptance. After grace, they are the fruit of acceptance. Faith, if it hath not works, is dead, being alone (James 2:17). Not every one that saith unto me, Lord, Lord, shall enter into the kingdom of heaven; but he that doeth the will of my Father (Matthew 7:21). And why call ye me, Lord, Lord, and do not the things which I say? (Luke 6:46).
A sermon that says only “stop trusting your morals” will be heard by some as “stop bothering with morals.” Dietrich Bonhoeffer called that hearing cheap grace — forgiveness without repentance, grace without discipleship, the Cross without the cost — and he wrote the phrase while watching the German church accommodate itself to the Third Reich. The cure for moralism is not antinomianism (the belief that grace frees a man from obligation to God’s law). It is the gospel, which condemns both.
Proportion
The post says the most dangerous people in hell will not be the murderers and rapists but the upstanding citizens. That is a striking line, and something like it is true: Jesus did say the harlots would enter the kingdom before the elders, and self-righteousness is the hardest soil because it does not know it is soil. But the line as written ranks the damned by their danger, and Scripture offers no such ranking. Exaggeration in the service of truth is still exaggeration — it is lying by proportion — and a reader who catches one exaggeration will discount the true things around it. The true proportion is enough: the respectable man is in exactly the same need as the murderer, and is less likely to know it.
The moral seeker is not only a decoy; he may be on the road
The post treats the moral non-Christian as nothing more than Satan’s advertisement. Scripture gives us another figure. Cornelius was a Roman centurion, a devout man, and one that feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway (Acts 10:2). He was not yet a Christian. And the angel said to him, Thy prayers and thine alms are come up for a memorial before God (Acts 10:4). God noticed his goodness. But notice what God did about it: He sent Peter, who would tell thee words, whereby thou and all thy house shall be saved (Acts 11:14). Cornelius’s goodness did not save him. It got him an audience — and the audience was with the gospel.
Paul says the Gentiles who have not the law do by nature the things contained in the law, showing the work of the law written in their hearts (Romans 2:14-15). And the law itself was our schoolmaster to bring us unto Christ (Galatians 3:24). Morality can be a road to Christ as well as a substitute for Him. The difference lies in one question: does a man’s goodness make him hungrier or fuller? Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness (Matthew 5:6). The conscience that takes the moral law seriously eventually discovers that it cannot keep it, and that discovery is the door. The danger is not in being moral; it is in being satisfied. The kind atheist, the Buddhist, the devout Muslim are not our enemies. They are captives to rescue — people held by something false — and some of them are closer to the door than the comfortable churchgoer.
IV. The Strongest Objection
Let me state the moral man’s objection in its strongest form, because he deserves to be heard and because the post does not answer him.
If God is good, surely He values goodness. You tell me a man who abused his children for forty years and repented on his deathbed is welcomed, while my neighbor — who has spent his life caring for the dying, never lied, never cheated, raised four honest children, and simply could not bring himself to believe — is cast out. That is not justice. That is favoritism for holding the right opinion. A God who prefers a correct belief to a good life is not a God I can admire.
That is a serious objection, and slogans will not answer it. To answer it we have to go below the post — below the level of which verses say what — to the question of what sin actually is and why goodness cannot reach it.
V. Comparing the Systems by What They Do With the Debt
The post lists four people — the atheist, the Buddhist, the Muslim, the moral churchgoer — and declares them all lost. It would be more illuminating to ask what each worldview does with the moral debt, because that is where they actually differ. Compare them not by their doctrinal checklists but by their architecture.
The secular humanist denies there is a debt — or rather, denies there is a creditor. Wrongdoing harms persons, and should be repaired as far as possible and otherwise forgotten. The Buddhist seeks to exit the system in which debts accrue, extinguishing the desire that drives the wheel of consequence. The Muslim hopes that on the day of judgment his good deeds will outweigh his bad on the scales, and that God’s mercy will cover the remainder; he cannot know until then. And the moral churchgoer the post describes is, structurally, running the Muslim’s scale under a Christian name: a private hope that the good outweighs the bad.
Christianity alone says that the debt is real, that it is owed, that it cannot be outweighed, and that God Himself paid it inside the system, at His own cost. Each of the other architectures tries to manage the debt from the debtor’s side. Only one has the creditor stepping into the debtor’s place. That is why the post is right that these paths do not arrive at the same destination: they are not different routes to one door; they are different answers to whether a door is needed at all.
VI. Why Goodness Cannot Pay
Because the damage is already done
The first reason is one I have argued at length in an earlier essay, “Reconciliation of Man with the Father.” Moral disorder, once introduced into the world, does not fade. It does not wear off with time, and it is not cancelled by later goods. A wrong done at one moment propagates from that moment; a good deed done later radiates from a later moment, and the two never meet. Restitution between persons should be made and can repair much. But it cannot reach backward into the act itself. A man who wrecked his neighbor’s car cannot undo the wreck by driving carefully for the next twenty years; he can only pay for it — or have it paid. Good works cannot cancel sin because they always arrive too late.
The physics this ministry is developing, which holds that the substance of reality is conscious — God’s own sustaining thought — so that in him we live, and move, and have our being (Acts 17:28) is description rather than metaphor, gives this a concrete form: a wrong act leaves a real imprint in the substance of creation, and an imprint is not erased by a later, unrelated pattern. But one need not accept that physics to see the point. Every honest man knows that his decent Tuesday did not unmake his cruel Monday.
Because the One we wronged was there
The second reason goes deeper, and it is the heart of what I believe distinguishes the faith I hold from the faith as it is commonly taught.
God does not watch our lives from a distance. He lives them from inside. The God in whom we live and move and have our being is present in every person’s experience — not as a spectator in the gallery but as the One whose awareness holds our awareness in existence. Scripture says it repeatedly, and we have read past it. In all their affliction he was afflicted (Isaiah 63:9). Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these my brethren, ye have done it unto me (Matthew 25:40) — not as if to Me, but to Me. The risen Christ did not ask Saul why he was persecuting the church; He asked, Saul, Saul, why persecutest thou me? (Acts 9:4). God grieved at his heart over the wickedness of men (Genesis 6:6), and we are told not to grieve the holy Spirit of God (Ephesians 4:30), which assumes He can be grieved by what we do.
A guard must be stated with this every time, because the distance between “God lives within our experience” and “we are God” is short for most readers. We are not God. We do not become God. We do not share His authority or His perspective. We are His creatures, held in being within Him. But we are held within Him, and we do what we do within His own experience.
Now consider what that means for sin. A lie is not a breach of a rule posted on a distant wall. It is a lie told inside God’s own experience, felt by Him from inside the liar and from inside the deceived. Cruelty is cruelty He suffers from inside the one who suffers it — and recoils from inside the one who inflicts it. Every sin is a wound in Someone. And this is why the moral man’s ledger fails. You cannot settle a wound in a person by subsequent good conduct toward third parties. If I have deeply wronged my friend, my kindness to strangers afterward — however real — does nothing to reconcile him. What heals a wounded relationship is not the offender’s later decency but reconciliation: acknowledgment, repentance, and forgiveness from the one who was wounded. And forgiveness is never free to the one who gives it. The one who forgives absorbs the cost of the wrong rather than exacting it.
That is what the Cross is. God, who suffered every human sin from within, entered His own creation as a man and took the full cost upon Himself—not by overlooking it, which His holiness could not do, but by bearing it. The Cross is not God demanding payment from a third party. It is the wounded One paying for His own wounds so those who wounded Him could come home.
Because reconciliation must be received
And this answers the moral man’s objection. His neighbor is not rejected for holding the wrong opinion. He has declined a reconciliation. The remedy is offered to every man; but a reconciliation cannot be imposed on someone who refuses it, any more than a friendship can. If God forced His forgiveness on those who will not have it, He would have overridden at the last moment the very freedom He created men to have — and obtained, at infinite cost, the puppet He declined to make at the beginning.
Jesus told the story of exactly this man. When the prodigal came home, and the father threw a feast, the elder brother was angry, and would not go in. And he said to his father: Lo, these many years do I serve thee, neither transgressed I at any time thy commandment (Luke 15:28-29). Every word of that was true. He had kept every rule in the house. And he stood outside, in the dark, refusing to go in — while the father, who had come out to plead with him, said, Son, thou art ever with me, and all that I have is thine (Luke 15:31).
That is the moral man who rejects Christ. His conduct is admirable; his relationship with his Father is dead. And the father’s grief was never about the chores.
VII. What Morality Is For
The post sets morality against Christ. Scripture does not. It sets morality as payment against Christ, and it sets morality as love inside Christ.
If ye love me, keep my commandments (John 14:15). This is the turn the whole question has been waiting for. If God lives our lives from inside — if every choice we make is a choice He experiences — then the reason to keep His law is not to earn His favor. It is that He feels what we do. A son does not refrain from cruelty to his brother in order to purchase his father’s approval; he refrains because he knows it would break his father’s heart, and he loves his father. The commandments do not change. What changes is their meaning: from the terms of a contract to the shape of a love.
So the moral man and the Christian may perform many of the same acts. The difference is not in the acts. It is in to whom they are offered and for what. The moral man offers his goodness to God as payment, or to no one at all. The Christian offers his goodness because of God, as thanksgiving and as love to the One who lives in him and feels his every choice. She loved much, said Jesus of the weeping woman, for her sins, which are many, are forgiven (Luke 7:47). Morality that flows out of forgiveness is not Satan’s counterfeit. It is the fruit the counterfeit imitates.
VIII. Why the Warning Still Stands
Having corrected the post in five places, I want to be clear that the corrections leave its alarm ringing louder, not softer. The concern it raises is real, and there are reasons to believe it is spreading.
The first reason is that it is intuitive. Every human being runs a ledger. We grade ourselves on a curve against the people we know, and almost everyone comes out above average. The idea that a good enough life earns heaven feels like common sense, because it is how every other human institution works — the school, the job, the court. The gospel is the one institution that does not work that way, and therefore it is the one most easily forgotten.
The second is that the church itself has taught the counterfeit. Sermons that preach “be a better you,” youth programs that teach niceness, funerals that assure every mourner the deceased is in heaven because he was a good man — these have formed generations of Americans who believe exactly what the post warns against. The surveys bear this out. In the 2025 American Worldview Inventory from the Cultural Research Center at Arizona Christian University, a majority of self-identified Christians — 53 percent — agreed that a generally good person, or one who does enough good things for others, will earn a place in heaven. The folk religion is not outside the church; it is in the pews.
The third is that a culture with no Cross has nowhere to put its guilt. If there is no forgiveness, there is only self-justification or accusation. A society built on moral self-sufficiency becomes either complacent — everyone is above average — or merciless — the guilty must be exposed, cancelled, and expelled, because there is no other way to deal with wrong. We are watching both happen at once.
So what should we do? Share the post, if you are moved to — but in your own words, add the verse after Ephesians 2:9, and do not tell anyone his sins do not matter. Ask yourself the question I have been pressing: does my goodness make me hungrier for God or fuller of myself? And speak to the moral man you know — the kind atheist, the devout neighbor of another faith — not as Satan’s advertisement but as the elder brother standing outside in the dark, whom the Father has come out to plead with.
The Bet I Am Making
I believe the gospel is true, and I believe the reason it is true. Not because I prefer grace to merit, but because of what sin is and who suffered it. Every wrong I have done was done inside the experience of the God who sustains me. I cannot pay that back by being good from here forward; the wound is not in the future, and it is not in a stranger. It is in Him, and it is already there. The only way home is the way He opened at His own cost.
And I believe that the moral man’s goodness, offered as payment, is the elder brother’s speech — true in every word and fatal in its spirit. The same goodness, offered as love to a Father who feels it, is the life Christ came to give. The Father is standing in the courtyard pleading. The feast is set. The only question left is whether we will go in.
For they being ignorant of God’s righteousness, and going about to establish their own righteousness, have not submitted themselves unto the righteousness of God. — Romans 10:3
For by grace are ye saved through faith; and that not of yourselves: it is the gift of God: Not of works, lest any man should boast. For we are his workmanship, created in Christ Jesus unto good works, which God hath before ordained that we should walk in them. — Ephesians 2:8-10
— Thomas
Sources
- The post under discussion: anonymous, originating on X and reshared on Facebook, seen 1 November 2026. Its opening two sentences are quoted; the rest is paraphrased.
- Christian Smith with Melinda Lundquist Denton, Soul Searching: The Religious and Spiritual Lives of American Teenagers (Oxford University Press, 2005) — the source of the phrase moralistic therapeutic deism.
- Cultural Research Center, Arizona Christian University, American Worldview Inventory 2025 (survey of 2,000 U.S. adults, March 2025), as reported in “Most self-identified Christians think doing ‘good things’ is enough to get to Heaven,” The Christian Post.
- Dietrich Bonhoeffer, The Cost of Discipleship (1937), chapter 1, “Costly Grace.”
- Renaissance Ministries, “Reconciliation of Man with the Father” (25 July 2026). https://renaissance-ministries.com/2026/07/25/260725-reconciliation-of-man-with-the-father/
- Renaissance Ministries, “The Kingdom of God and Kingdoms of Men” (18 April 2026). https://renaissance-ministries.com/2026/04/18/the-kingdom-of-god-and-kingdoms-of-men/
Renaissance Ministries | Hyperphysics Institute
Of one heart to make Christ King – 1 Chronicles 12:38