The Beginning Of Sorrows “LOIMOS”
Whose coming is one of the Foretold
Still is relentlessly moving so very Bold
And HIV will Continue On Its Deadly Roll
Not Passing Away Till Millennium Bells Toll
August 3, 2008
http://www.tribulationperiod.com/
We aren’t in the Tribulation Period, but we have been in “the beginning of sorrows” for some time.
The “beginning of sorrows” will intensify in the Tribulation Period to include “fearful sights and great signs” from heaven as indicated in Luke’ s account of the Olivet Di
scourse.
Luke 21:11 – And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven.
Begin Archive Prophecy Update Number 19
Prophecy Update Number 19
March 2001
Matthew 24:7,8 – For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom: and there shall be famines, and pestilences (loimos), and earthquakes, in divers places. [8] All these are the beginning of sorrows (odin).
In Prophecy Update Number 18 we conducted a lengthy discussion of why earthquakes, famine, and pestilence were, just before Jesus returns, according to the word “odin,” supposed to follow the pattern of birth pangs
a woman suffers in child bearing.
We demonstrated that, for the first time in history, when Israel became a nation, worldwide earthquakes were following such a pattern. But what about Matthew’s “pestilence?” Is it following the pattern of a woman’s birth travail for the first time since Jesus prophesied it would? Absolutely! The basic root meaning of the word “loimos,” translated “pestilence,” is simply “any deadly infectious disorder.” Many plagues have passed through mankind since the fall, but none have generated a massive epidemic that was continuously accelerating over a long period of time.
These “loimos” have never been able to follow the pattern of a woman’s birth pains for very long on a worldwide basis. Cholera, small pox, typhoid, bubonic plague, and so on, have appeared in short spurts like false labor, but none has ever maintained a persistent, ever increasing, epidemic characteristic with seemingly no end.
But now, for the first time, we have a “loimos,” a deadly infectious disorder, that has portrayed these characteristics from its inception.
The HIV virus is the first to perfectly match the pattern of a woman’s birth pangs, and it will continue to do so until the travail of the woman Israel ends, and the Son she rejected arrives.
HIV is a virus that has swept across the globe like wildfire.
HIV cases worldwide increased from a trace in 1980 to more than 5 million in 1985, to more than 10 million in 1990, to more than 20 million in 1995, and to a whopping 35 million in 2000. AIDS, the dreadful blossom of HIV, was first reported in a British sailor, who died in England in 1959. HIV has hardest hit Africa up to this point, but it is poised to spread into Asia and the former Soviet Union as an ever-increasing storm. And, in truth, medical researchers seem no closer to fining a cure than they were twenty years ago.
Are there other types of “loimos” infections that have also started to demonstrate the patterns of a woman’s birth pangs? Yes! The World Health Organization (WHO) fears that tuberculosis may kill 30 million worldwide during the next decade. The emergence of drug-resistant strains, and the spread of HIV have both hampered efforts by health agencies to slow the renewed spread of the consumptive illness. Another sort of “loimos” is malaria, which is on the rise around the world, and once curative treatments are losing their effect. It is a pestilence of global dimensions, and new strains are evolving that scientists fear will be untreatable.
But what about all the microbes generating all this pestilence, this “loimos,” these deadly infectious disorders, what are they doing, how are they behaving? Are they doing something that will make the pestilences continue to act like a woman’s birth pangs through the tribulation period? Yes! A leading national magazine cover, back in the last century, carried the bold print title: “REVENGE OF THE KILLER MICROBES – ARE WE LOSING THE WAR AGAINST INFECTIOUS DISEASES?” Tuft’s Levy answered the question in Newsweek Magazine by stating: “The rise of drug-resistant germs is unparalleled in recorded biologic history.” Because of this contributing factor, pestilence will become more and more widespread in its acceleration until the second advent of Christ.
Begin Excerpt from International Herald Tribune
The wrong way to fight AIDS
By Laurie Garrett
Wednesday, July 30, 2008
In a few days some 20,000 people who work in various capacities on the AIDS pandemic will gather in Mexico City for the International AIDS Conference.
I will not be there: This will mark the first AIDS Conference I have deliberately missed since 1985, when a cluster of scientists convened the first such gathering in Atlanta.
Many of the leading lights in the battle against AIDS from all over the world are similarly disinclined to attend, saying they are not able to join in celebrating the creation of a vast, multibillion dollar AIDS treatment industry, employing hundreds of thousands of individuals worldwide that serve as a vested lobby on behalf of a prolonged medical approach to a virus that ought to be eliminated entirely from the pantheon of threats to Humanity.
Do not misunderstand – there is genuine joy among us every day that millions of people are kept alive because of the 1996 invention of combination drug treatment for HIV. All HIV-positive people the world over should be able to share in the benefits of those treatments, and the U.S. Congress is to be congratulated for recently passing a $48 billion reauthorization of the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or Pepfar.
But it is troubling that formerly militant activists, United Nations agency leaders, government health officials, the American foreign policy establishment, religious leaders, scientists and physicians fail to see AIDS treatment for what it is: A stop-gap measure to tide humanity over until we can collectively reach what ought to be our real goal – stopping HIV’s spread, entirely.
On an individual basis living with AIDS is a proper goal; on a population basis it is catastrophic.
The slogan of the first 15 years of the pandemic was, “Until there is a cure!” Today it seems the global health leadership of the world is satisfied with, “Until there is lifelong drug therapy for everybody, and no prevention strategy!” A dangerous sentiment is sweeping over the AIDS establishment, calling for elimination of all funding for HIV vaccine research and prevention programs, shifting those dollars, euros and yen to expanding HIV treatment.
It is inconceivable that children coming of age in 2021 – 40 years after the recognized start of this epidemic – will feel gratitude toward today’s leaders for saddling them with a still widely circulating virus. If today’s HIV-treatment model is viewed as an interim step – keeping people alive until a cure and vaccine are discovered – its funding and expansion make sense not only morally, but also as a practical matter of economics and foreign policy – but only if a massive commitment to funding searches for both a vaccine and cure for HIV are sustained for years to come. (Even the cancer lobby recognizes the needs for both oncology treatment access and ongoing curative research.)
Yes, recent news from the HIV-research front is demoralizing. The best-funded HIV vaccine trials have all failed over recent months, or been halted due to serious safety concerns. The vaginal microbicide trials have fared even worse, with the compounds actually increasing the likelihood of women becoming infected.
As for “cures” – no leading figure in HIV research has publicly uttered the word cure since the early 1990s. Most of the multibillion dollar HIV research enterprise focuses on improving the treatment model that is already in place, finding new, consistently more expensive drugs to add to the existing cocktails. The global price of this giant treatment exercise will inexorably increase.
The economist Mead Over of the Center for Global Development warns that with Pepfar, “the United States has unwittingly created a new global “entitlement” to U.S.-funded AIDS treatment that currently costs about $2 billion a year and could grow to as much as $12 billion a year by 2016- more than half of what the United States spent on total overseas development assistance in 2006.
And the AIDS treatment entitlement would continue to grow, squeezing out spending on HIV prevention measures or on other critical development needs, all of which would be considered “discretionary” by comparison.”
By 2016, meanwhile, Americans may find themselves fed up with generosity.
If we cannot find a way to reform the U.S. health care system, we will likely by then have some 80 million citizens without health insurance, including HIV-positive people, and medical costs will devour $1 out of every $4 of America’s GDP. We will be servicing a national debt in the trillions of dollars while struggling with everything from global climate change to catastrophic disparities in access to food, energy and water. Our dreams require a dose of realism.
At the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation there is much talk of “aspirational goals” in health, such as dreaming of eradicating malaria. What is the aspirational goal for AIDS?
Shout it loud in Mexico City: “Until there is a cure!”
Laurie Garrett is a senior fellow for global health at the Council on Foreign Relations.
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