The Devil and His Minions Are Walking Among Us! Oh Noes!!!!!!!!!!!!!

 

Satan’s Elite Hacker Squad Strikes Again! 

Bob Thiel’s Servers Toast While 

Heaven Apparently Takes a Coffee Break.

Greetings from the front lines of the cosmic IT war!

Poor Crackpot Bob Thiel (self-appointed final Philadelphian torch-bearer of the improperly named Continuing Church of God) has once again suffered a “hacker attack.” And of course, it’s not some script-kiddie with a $5 botnet or a guy who noticed Crackpot Bob’s password is still “Armstrong123.” No, no, no. It’s Satan and his minions. The actual Devil. Roaring lion. Seeking whom he may devour. Specifically, Bob’s web servers!

Because nothing says “priority one for the Prince of Darkness” like taking down the website that posts weekly updates about how everyone else is Laodicean and only Crackpot Bob’s tiny group gets the two wings of a great eagle to Petra.

Crackpot Bob solemnly reminds us to be sober and vigilant (1 Peter 5:8), then immediately pivots to Hebrews 12:11 about chastening being painful but fruitful. Translation: “My site is down again and it hurts my feelings, but don’t worry, this is just God spanking me for my own good while the demons high-five over the keyboard.”

And the best part? Crackpot Bob’s own theology insists the end-time Philadelphian work cannot be stopped. It will continue until the 1335 days, the place of safety, the nuclear fireworks on London, the whole Armstrong-prophecy bingo card. God’s work shall not be thwarted! The succession remnant marches on!…Except when Satan’s minions briefly make the homepage say “404 – True Church Not Found.” Then it’s a spiritual crisis requiring multiple Bible verses, a history lesson on 1979 Pastor General’s Reports, and a sermonette about Petra.

Sure, Bob. The Almighty who spoke the universe into existence somehow can’t keep a WordPress site online against a few horned sysadmins with root access. But don’t you dare call it “Bob needs better security and maybe a grown-up web host.” That’s just more ridicule from the minions!

We are to take our tests one day at a time, endure to the end, and pretend that every outage is a badge of Philadelphian honor instead of, you know, the natural result of running a fringe prophecy site that spends more energy declaring itself the only true remnant than updating its SSL certificates.

Keep enduring, Bob. Your god says the work can’t be stopped. The demons just keep hitting refresh on the denial-of-service button for the lulz.

Dear Brethren and Co-Workers in Christ:

Greetings from Grover Beach, California.

We endured another hacker attack this week. While we are working to recover from that, we all need to remember we are to:

8 Be sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour. (1 Peter 5:8)

Satan continues to use his minions to attack, as well as having others of them to ridicule, this work. While that is to be expected (Matthew 5:10-12), we also realize that the Apostle Paul wrote:

11 Now no chastening seems to be joyful for the present, but painful; nevertheless, afterward it yields the peaceable fruit of righteousness to those who have been trained by it. (Hebrews 12:11)

We are to take our tests and trials one day at a time (Matthew 6:34) and endure to the end (Matthew 10:22).

The end time Philadelphian work cannot be stopped–and will continue until it is time to flee as the old Worldwide Church of God taught:

GOD’S CHURCH–who wait and endure until the 1335 days–approximately 1335 days prior to Christ’s coming. But since no one can know the day or the hour of His coming, we probably shall not be able to know the exact day that this 1335 days begins. But apparently that is the time when OUR WORK SHALL END. That will be a time when the UNITED EUROPE shall appear –the revival of the medieval “Holy Roman Empire.” We shall then be warned, and readied to be taken to a place of refuge and safety from the Great Tribulation. Forty-five days later “the beast’s” armies will surround Jerusalem. Thirty days later tho Great Tribulation will probably start with a nuclear attack on London and Britain–and possibly the same day or immediately after, on United States and Canadian cities. The GREAT TRIBULATION, we shall then fully realize, is the time of “Jacob’s Trouble,” spoken of in Jeremiah 30:7. (Armstrong HW. The Time We Are In, Now. Pastor General’s Report-Vol 1, No. 15, November 20, 1979, p. 1)

The “Philadelphia era” or succession of God’s Church will be taken on the “two wings of a great eagle”–whatever that symbolizes–to a place of protection where we are to be “fed”–provided for. (Armstrong HW. Great Significance of Summit Conference. Pastor General’s Report, Vol. 2, No. 26, June 27, 1980).

The Continuing Church of God represents the succession remnant of the Philadelphian era living in this time of Laodicean dominance.

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.

Sheldon Monson: Pulled a Bob Thiel and Now Demands Zero Criticism

 

When Sheldon Monson, in a fit of rebellion and backstabbing, left the Living Church of God to form his own group, it seemed perfectly fine to him to disregard respect for Roderick Meredith (and later Gerald Weston) along with any criticism directed at him. So he goes and pulls a Bob Thiel, launching his own organization—the Church of God Assembly—while drawing away as many members as he can persuade (or, some would say, con) into following him.

Then, lo and behold, two of his highly placed men turned their backs on him, and he was not happy. Suddenly his followers needed to be reminded—via a staff writer in the April–June issue of A Good Report—that they must submit to the ministry at every level and must never criticize their leaders. Doing so, the piece insists, is nothing less than rebellion against God!

The irony is almost too rich to ignore. The very man who once found it acceptable to break ranks, question authority, and lead a significant portion of the flock out of LCG now oversees a publication that hammers home the classic Armstrongist refrain of top-down church government: absolute submission, zero criticism, and the equation of questioning human leaders with opposing God Himself. What was once framed as necessary faithfulness or standing for truth when he was the one departing is recast as satanic rebellion the moment the shoe is on the other foot and his own subordinates walk away.

This pattern is painfully familiar across the Churches of God landscape. Leaders frequently invoke the language of divine hierarchy and “God’s government” only after they have secured their own position. Criticism is tolerated—or even celebrated—when it justifies a split; it becomes anathema the moment it threatens the new structure. The April–June A Good Report article simply continues that long tradition, admonishing the rank-and-file to keep quiet, stay in line, and treat every level of the ministry as beyond reproach, all while the group’s own founding story is one of open break with the previous hierarchy.In short: rebellion is fine when you’re the one rebelling. Once you’re in charge, it’s suddenly an unforgivable sin against God.

Sheldon Monson - Living Proof Old Traditions Never Die - Raising Godly Kids the Armstrong Way—Just Mind the Soft Spots

It was only four days ago that we posted Samuel Martin’s letter on the use of corporal punishment, some of it rooted in old Worldwide Church of God beliefs. People rushed in to insist that the old abusive styles of punishment were relics—no longer practiced in “the church” today. How reassuring. 

A reader has now pointed out Sheldon Monson’s piece in the April-June issue of A Good Report (Church of God Assembly, a Living Church of God splinter). In it, the classic Armstrongist advice reappears for raising “godly” children: corporal punishment is fine, just don’t slap the face or hit near the vital organs.

This is the same worn-out material Garner Ted Armstrong and Roderick Meredith peddled for decades. Spare the face, spare the kidneys, but by all means apply the rod (or hand, or switch) elsewhere. After all, Proverbs is clear, the child’s heart is full of foolishness, and nothing says godly parenting like carefully calibrated physical pain—delivered, of course, in love and never in anger. 

Modern child-development research, changing legal standards in many places, and simple observations about trauma and aggression can all take a back seat. The old playbook still works if you just avoid the head and the soft spots.

Armstrongism’s child-rearing tradition never really retired; it just splintered, rebranded, and kept the fine print. Monson’s group continues the lineage, and A Good Report is happy to pass along the refined technique: hit them, but do it “properly.” 

Four days after Martin’s critique, the same old instructions surface again. Coincidence? Or just the unbroken habit of treating carefully limited violence as a biblical parenting essential?

Assyria Is Coming! (Brought to You by the Same Crackpot Who Has Been Wrong About Everything Else)

Bob Thiel has once again climbed into the prophetic costume trunk and emerged as Hosea. Not the actual 8th-century BC prophet who lived and spoke to a specific people in a specific historical crisis, but a modern cosplay version complete with British-Israelism decoder ring, concentration-camp warnings, and the solemn assurance that the United States, Canada, Britain, Australia, and New Zealand are about to be hauled off as slaves to serve the Europeans. The performance is so familiar it could be scheduled on the calendar right next to the memorial he notes for July 31.

The core move never changes. Take a book written to the northern kingdom of Israel in the decades before the Assyrian conquest of 722 BC. Re-label the ancient tribes with modern English-speaking nations (Manasseh = USA, Ephraim = the rest of the Anglo-Saxon club, Judah = the modern state of Israel). Re-label ancient Assyria as Germany or a German-led Europe. Then announce that the original prophecy is really about us, right now, and that only those who accept this particular mapping will understand when to flee. The rest of the Bible is then pressed into service as supporting scenery: Daniel 11, Leviticus 26, Amos, Isaiah, and a Catholic medieval prediction for good measure. The result is a detailed future in which invading armies set up camps, Anglo-Saxons are shipped to Europe as forced labor, cities burn, and the “Philadelphia remnant” has already escaped because they alone possessed the secret decoder.

This is not exegesis. It is national identity cosplay dressed up as prophecy. British Israelism has been dismantled by genetics, linguistics, archaeology, and simple historical literacy for generations. The Anglo-Saxon peoples are not the lost tribes of Israel. The northern kingdom was carried into Assyrian exile in the 8th century BC; that is the historical fulfillment of the core warnings in Hosea. The book is not a coded map of 21st-century NATO alliances or EU policy. Treating it as such requires the same elastic imagination that once turned the Soviet Union into the King of the North and then quietly swapped in whoever was currently convenient.

The concentration-camp-and-slavery flourish is pure escalation. Hosea does speak of judgment, exile, and hard labor. It does not describe modern industrial slavery under European administration, nor does it require modern readers to invent logistical details about who will staff the camps and which English-speaking populations will be sorted into which rail cars. That level of specificity is supplied by the interpreter, not the text. Once you have already decided that “Assyria” equals contemporary Germany and “Ephraim” equals the UK and its cousins, the rest of the horror story writes itself. The same method can, and historically has, produced any number of failed dates and shifting villains.

Under the New Covenant, the entire apparatus is unnecessary. The New Covenant is not a refined version of national covenant curses aimed at physical descendants of Jacob. It is the fulfillment of the promise that God would write His law on hearts, forgive sins, and create one new people in Christ drawn from every nation. The categories that matter are not Manasseh, Ephraim, and Assyria. They are in Christ or outside of Christ. Judgment is real; so is the call to repentance. But that judgment is not a tribal score-settling based on 19th-century speculative Anglo-Saxon ethnography. Believers are not required to track which modern army might one day fulfill an 8th-century BC oracle against Samaria in order to know whether they are safe. Safety is found in the finished work of the Son of God, not in correctly identifying the end-time identity of the lost tribes and then fleeing to the appointed place of safety before the King of the North’s trains start rolling.

Hosea’s final verse still stands: “Who is wise? Let him understand these things.” Wisdom in this case includes recognizing when an ancient prophetic book is being used as a delivery system for modern fear and self-appointed authority. The Crackpot Prophet can keep the costume. The rest of us are free to leave the stage.

The Great Mantle Cage Match: Armstrongism’s Endless Fight Over Who Gets to Wear the Imaginary Cape

Armstrongism has always had a soft spot for theater. Not the good kind—the kind where grown men in suits convince themselves (and as many others as possible) that God runs a divine relay race, and the baton must be handed off in unbroken succession from one “true church era” to the next. Somewhere along the line this baton became a “mantle.” After 1986 the mantle was supposedly dropped, recovered, contested, re-stitched, and fought over like a championship belt in a particularly sad independent wrestling circuit. By 1989 and the years that followed, a rotating cast of self-appointed successors were all insisting that they alone now wore it. The resulting spectacle has been equal parts tragic and ridiculous.

Herbert W. Armstrong taught that the seven churches of Revelation 2–3 were not seven contemporaneous congregations in Asia Minor, but successive eras of the one true church stretching across two thousand years. Ephesus, Smyrna, Pergamos, Thyatira, Sardis, Philadelphia, and finally Laodicea. The “Philadelphia era,” he claimed, was the one God raised up through him in the twentieth century. When he died, the story goes, the mantle of authority and truth had to pass to someone else. A continuous, identifiable organizational line was required; otherwise the “true church” would have ceased to exist.

This is not how the New Testament describes the church. It is, however, how Armstrongism has always preferred to operate: hierarchical, exclusive, and obsessed with proving institutional continuity. The problem is that the entire framework collapses under the weight of its own assumptions.

Revelation’s letters were written to real first-century churches facing real first-century problems. Turning them into a coded timeline of successive eras requires an interpretive method that would make even the most creative dispensationalist blush. There is no biblical command that a single visible organization must survive unbroken from the apostles to the present day carrying a special “mantle.” The early church itself was messy, multi-centered, and frequently divided. Paul did not hand Timothy a cape and declare him the next era’s apostle. The idea that God requires a continuous corporate franchise with a designated CEO is pure institutional mythology.

After Armstrong’s death the Worldwide Church of God under Joseph Tkach began dismantling core doctrines. That left a vacuum, and nature (and narcissism) abhors a vacuum. Beginning in the late 1980s and accelerating through the 1990s, a parade of men stepped forward to claim the mantle. Gerald Flurry founded the Philadelphia Church of God in 1989 and declared that Malachi’s Message was the new revelation, proving he was the rightful heir. David Pack later built his own empire around the claim that he alone understood the true prophetic sequence and that Christ would return to Wadsworth, Ohio. Bob Thiel eventually decided that the previous claimants were insufficiently prophetic and that he, complete with self-granted titles and African “work,” now carried the authentic succession. Others—Brisby, Weinland, Cox, Kitchen, and a rotating supporting cast—have all insisted at various times that the mantle rests on their shoulders.

What followed was not a dignified transfer of spiritual authority. It was a decades-long food fight over who gets to sit in the big chair and collect the tithes. Each claimant has produced books, sermons, and websites proving that every other claimant is Laodicean, deceived, or worse. The “one true church” has splintered into dozens of competing true churches, each with its own prophet, its own timeline, and its own exclusive claim to the mantle. The absurdity is almost self-parodying: if the mantle is so vital to God’s plan, why does the Almighty keep losing track of who is wearing it?

The succession doctrine is stupid on multiple levels.

First, it is historically false. There is no unbroken line of pure doctrine from the first century through the Middle Ages into the twentieth. The Church of God (Seventh Day) that Armstrong left was itself a relatively recent American Adventist offshoot. Armstrong did not restore an ancient continuous church; he founded a new religious movement that borrowed selectively from earlier Sabbatarian groups and then declared itself the exclusive remnant. Pretending otherwise requires rewriting history.

Second, it is theologically bankrupt. It confuses the invisible church—the body of all who are in Christ—with a visible corporation complete with letterhead, payroll, and hierarchical titles. The New Testament never requires believers to locate the one true organizational franchise in order to be part of the true church. It requires faith in Christ.

Third, it produces exactly the fruit one would expect from a false system: endless schism, personality cults, failed date-setting, financial exploitation, and the suppression of dissent. Every new “mantle-bearer” eventually faces the same problem: the prophecies do not land, the “work” does not grow as advertised, and the next ambitious underling begins eyeing the cape. The cycle repeats.

Even if one granted every historical and prophetic claim Armstrongism makes, the mantle would still be irrelevant under the New Covenant.

The New Covenant is not administered by a succession of human “apostles” or “prophets” who inherit organizational authority. It is administered by the risen Christ through the Spirit. The old covenant had a visible priesthood, a temple, and a system of mediators. The New Covenant has one Mediator. The veil is torn. Access is direct. The Spirit is poured out on all flesh—sons and daughters, young and old—not restricted to a clerical class that claims exclusive succession rights.

There is no biblical office of “end-time apostle” who must pass a mantle so that the true church can continue. There is the ongoing work of the Spirit building the body of Christ wherever people repent and believe the gospel. The idea that God needs a continuous corporate entity with a designated human figurehead in order to preserve truth is a denial of the sufficiency of Christ and the Spirit. It is old-covenant thinking dressed up in twentieth-century organizational clothes.

The New Covenant church does not need a mantle. It needs the Head. It does not need a succession chart proving institutional purity. It needs the gospel. It does not need men fighting over who gets to wear the imaginary cape. It needs people who have actually encountered the living Christ and are being transformed by grace.

Armstrongism’s mantle wars are the predictable result of a system that elevated organizational continuity and hierarchical authority above the plain teaching of the New Testament. The men still fighting over the cape in 2026 are simply the latest actors in a long-running farce. The tragedy is that real people continue to be drawn into the performance, convinced that finding the correct mantle-wearer is the same thing as finding Christ.

It is not. Under the New Covenant the search is already over. The only One who ever needed to wear the mantle already does—and He is not taking applications for successors.

Lecturing the Sheep on Humility While the Shepherds Build Empires

The Importance of Working Together… Just Not at the Top

Doug Winnail of the Living Church of God recently offered the membership another gentle pastoral reminder:

We are to be humble; live in harmony; be patient; avoid being haughty, conceited, or ambitious; and be willing to yield… Proverbs 13:10 reminds us that pride is a major cause of contention… Are you developing these skills?

Beautiful words. Truly. One can almost hear the soft strains of “Blest Be the Tie That Binds” playing in the background while the faithful nod solemnly and resolve to try harder.

And yet.

For more than nine decades, the ministry of Armstrongism has treated humility the way a cat treats a bathtub. They preach it. They demand it. They weaponize it against the membership. They simply never practice it.

Herbert W. Armstrong did not build an empire of servant-leaders. He built a top-down, hierarchical machine in which the man at the top was “God’s Apostle,” the ministers were his extensions, and the membership existed primarily to tithe, obey, and stay quiet. Questioning a decision was “rebellion.” Suggesting a better way was “ambition.” Leaving was “apostasy.” The entire system was engineered so that humility flowed only one direction: downward.

When the old Worldwide Church of God finally imploded in the mid 1990s, the same men who had spent decades demanding that members “yield” and “live in harmony” immediately began carving out their own little kingdoms. These narcissistic and bitter men went on to form numerous splinter groups. Global, United, Living, Philadelphia, Restored, Continuing, Church of God a Worldwide Association—each new letterhead required a new headquarters, a new magazine, a new Feast circuit, and a new claim that this particular group was the one true remnant. Not a single one of the splinter leaders did this with a humble servant leader attitude. The same scriptures Winnail now quotes were suddenly reinterpreted to mean “unity… as long as it is under my authority.”

Pride, it turns out, is only a problem when the people in the pews display it.

Look at the historical record without the rose-colored glasses. Ministers in the old WCG routinely exercised the kind of control that would make a medieval bishop blush. Members were told whom they could marry, what medical treatments they could accept, how much they had to give, and which thoughts were acceptable. “Government from the top down” was not a slogan; it was a lifestyle. The servant-leader ideal of Jesus washing the disciples’ feet was transformed into the minister washing his hands of any responsibility for the wreckage he left behind.

The post-1986 era simply made the pattern more obvious. Leaders who once sat at the same conference tables, broke bread together at church potlucks, and shared in the broken body of Christ at the Passover now refuse to share a stage. They compete for the same aging membership base while solemnly warning their people against “division.” They lecture about avoiding haughtiness while carefully protecting titles, salaries, and the right to decide who is Laodicean this week. They quote Paul calling others “fellow workers” and then treat every other COG group as a rival corporation.

And when the rank-and-file finally grow tired of the endless splitting, the endless failed prophecies, and the endless demands for more money and more loyalty, the same men who created the chaos turn around and solemnly remind everyone that pride is the real problem. The solution, of course, is never for the men at the top to yield an inch of control or admit they might have been wrong. The solution is always for the membership to become more humble.

This is not servant leadership. This is managed authoritarianism dressed up in Sabbath-keeping language.

Jesus defined greatness as the willingness to become the servant of all. Armstrongism defined greatness as the willingness to demand that others become the servants of the organization. One of these approaches produces the fruit of the Spirit. The other produces a landscape littered with broken families, disillusioned members, and dozens of competing groups each convinced that God is uniquely working through them.

So when Doug Winnail asks the membership, “Are you developing these skills?” the honest answer from anyone who has watched the last forty years of Armstrongist history is simple:

We have watched the ministry model the opposite of those skills for generations. Perhaps it is time the teachers started taking their own medicine.

Until then, the weekly calls for humility will continue to ring hollow—because the people who most need to hear them are the ones holding the microphones.