Armstrongism: Where the Kingdom of God Comes With a Body Count and a Grumpy Australian Cult Leader

Armstrongism truly gets dumber by the day. Of course, this particular specimen comes from the Wade Cox cult, so the depth of the absurdity should surprise no one.

One of Wade’s devoted acolytes recently posted the following gem on a shiny new Facebook group dedicated to the first resurrection. Here it is, cleaned up just enough so the English is readable:

Revelation 13:17 and Revelation 14:11 refer to what will happen to the majority of humanity during the Great Tribulation, where many will die. About 50–60% of human beings alive today have their fate sealed in this category and will perish within that 1,260-day period of the Great Tribulation. Immediately following that 1,260-day tribulation is what Revelation 16:2 represents: a period of about two and a half months in which the Faithful Loyal Heavenly Host of God’s angels and the Resurrected Saints of the First Resurrection will take over the affairs of planet Earth and subjugate the world, eliminating any further rebellion and disobedience against God’s Law. All human beings who have not yet repented will be put to death, and only the truly repentant survivors of the Great Tribulation (constituting about 10% of the current world population) will be allowed to live to see the 1,335th day since the Great Tribulation began. These are the Blessed Innumerable Multitude (90 million people) who constitute the human holy seed that God will have tithed out of the Earth’s harvest to repopulate the planet for the next 1,000 years of Christ’s earthly Millennial rule. So we have 1,260 days of Great Tribulation, with the First Resurrection taking place on the fourth day following that period. From that 1,264th day of the First Resurrection there shall be exactly 71 days of gathering the Holy Seed (repentant human beings) for Christ’s Millennial system and subjugating the planet under Christ’s governance. Anyone who lives to see the 1,335th day is happy and blessed. Only the Resurrected Saints and the said repentant 10% of humanity will see that day. All the rest of humanity will die as that coveted 1,335th day approaches. Before mid-2030 all these things shall have happened.

In other words: half to three-fifths of the planet gets wiped out in the tribulation. Then, in a brisk 71-day cleanup operation, Wade’s resurrected saints (backed by loyal angels, naturally) put the remaining unrepentant to the sword. The lucky 90 million survivors—hand-picked “holy seed”—get to repopulate the earth under the firm, loving hand of Wade’s crew and Christ for the next thousand years. Consent is optional; non-compliance is terminal. And the whole pre-millennial circus wraps up by mid-2030 and then the thousand year reign begins. Mark your calendars.

Now examine this fever dream in the light of the New Covenant—the actual one inaugurated by Jesus’ blood (Luke 22:20; Hebrews 8–10), not the one that apparently requires a hierarchical army of resurrected Armstrongist loyalists to enforce compliance at gunpoint (or sword-point).

The New Covenant is not a divine martial-law regime in which “saints” and angels spend two and a half months methodically slaughtering dissenters so the remaining 10% can be force-fed the correct calendar, diet, and hierarchy. It is the covenant in which God writes His law on hearts and minds by the Spirit, remembers sins no more, and brings people into relationship with Himself through faith in Christ—not through surviving a body-count quota administered by the First Resurrection class of 2030. Jesus explicitly said His kingdom is not of this world and does not advance by the methods of this world (John 18:36). The apostles never described the gospel as “repent or be executed by the newly risen elect so you cant help repopulate the earth under our supervision.” That is the logic of a theocratic purge, not the New Covenant.

Yet here we are treated to precise population percentages, an exact 71-day subjugation window, a tidy 90-million “holy seed,” and a hard deadline of mid-2030—none of which appear in Scripture, all of which somehow place Wade Cox’s organization at the administrative center of the Millennium. How convenient.

So, all you Laodicean sinners who refuse to bow to grumpy Wade and his henchmen, you had better get your act together. You have until mid-2030 before the real fun starts. If Wade’s timeline feels a touch too exclusive, there is always Bob Thiel’s version—equally unhinged, equally self-referential, and equally untethered from the New Covenant. One can almost picture the two of them as the Two Witless Witnesses strolling the streets of Jerusalem, arguing over who has the more accurate prophetic spreadsheet while the rest of humanity quietly prefers the lake of fire to a thousand years of listening to either of them.

Spending the Millennium under that management is not, it turns out, a selling point of the gospel.