There’s always been lots of ’em . . . they’re still floating around and growing with an increasing urgency. One-World-Governmental, New-World-Ordered, Illuminatified, Rothschildian-dominated, Masonic-Knights-Templared, Area 51ers, Roswellites, Alien-encounterers, Trilateral Commissars, Bilderberg Groupies, and even Bigfooters, every one of them secretly controlling the world (except Bigfoot), making decisions for you, determining every facet of your life so that you are just a puppet in a play run by those who control everything, even your thoughts. These gnostic theories are seductive to men. Once seduced, there is no letting go, since there is no way to disprove them. The harder one works to disprove anything, the inability to disprove it is used by the conspiracy initiate as evidence of the conspiracy. Eventually, they can become self-fulfilling, just as someone who dabbles in the occult can literally vex themselves to death over the spell they think someone else put on them. It seems a waste to me to die that way, but some would have it so.

There are as many conspiracy theories as there are conspiracy theorists. They abound like aphids on an infected crepe myrtle. The conspiracy theory surrounding aphids is that they secretly plan to infect and kill every tree on the planet. But that can’t be true, since the realization of their goals would mean their own demise. Hmmmm! Maybe that’s what all conspiracy theorists desire . . . their own demise; or sensing their own demise is imminent, even if there were no conspiracies, they seek something to blame it on. Maybe, they think, we’d all live forever if conspirators weren’t conspiring against us. Even the Earth conspires against us. Nature. Asteroids. Volcanoes. Earthquakes. The Cosmos. Things so large we can’t grasp them, down to things so small we can’t see them clearly with the most powerful optical devices. There’s a whole host of things conspiring to kill us, enslave us, subjugate us, and control our minds . . . all of them at the beck and call of conspirators. There is no escape, only a Gnostic initiation through which we are enlightened enough to be able to name the conspiracy. Ahhh! That doesn’t give me much hope. There’s just no disproving a conspiracy theory, nor is there much of a chance to prove one. There is only the faith of the believer in the conspiracy.

The conspiracy may exist. It may not. What one takes as truth another dismisses as fable. This is not new. It is the way of things of faith. Our faith is our faith and not necessarily the world’s fact. Having your faith challenged is something one should get used to. If it is easily challenged, then one should examine one’s own faith. If the fact that someone else’s faith has led them to a different conclusion causes our own foundations to buckle, then we need a stronger foundation.

I suppose the original conspiracy theory is the belief that God exists and is interested in the affairs of men. Men got together and developed complex theories and doctrines about this . . . we call it theology. Is there a connection between the word theory and the word theology? Etymologists and philologists may say yes or no, but if they dare say no, then I’ll know that some conspiracy is afoot.

Where one man plainly sees evidence of God’s existence, another sees nothing beyond what his senses tell him. Where one man thinks he has a sense beyond those we normally identify as the senses, another man can process no information beyond sight, hearing, taste, touch, and smell. This is not new. It’s been around as long as men, so why should anyone be threatened by it?

I admit that I am also a conspiracy theorist. Mine is an ancient one that has been shared by many millions of people. It was around way before there was a Tri-Lateral Commission, but was perhaps contemporary with an ancient New World Order.  I will tell you about it if you can stand it and sit still for a spell.

When the world was young, there was a king here. He was the most intelligent and beautiful of all creation. Yet, as a created being, he could not share in the nature of the relationship that God had with Himself, thus through a perverse twist, he began to covet something that was not his and became consumed with that most dangerous of passions, envy. His name was Lucifer. He said, apparently to himself and others, “I will ascend into heaven. I will be like the Most High.”

Lucifer never thought he could kick God off His own throne; he just demanded an equal share of something that was not rightfully his. This didn’t quite work out like he planned, but having been consumed by his own perversion, he proceeded with a revised, diminished plan, which was just to be evil for the sake of being evil. God was not unaware of the perversion in Lucifer’s heart. Though God created Lucifer, God did not create evil; it started as the proud, haughty seed of perversion and was then nurtured in the heart of envy. I will. I will. I will. When one declares, “I will” too many times, one soon starts willing to possess things to which he has no right.

When it became obvious to Lucifer that he had exceeded his authority, crossing the event horizon of something with more energy than any black hole, he knew there was no escape. Then very angry at God, and himself, as are all those consumed by envy, through his great intelligence and subtlety, persuaded a full third of the angels in heaven to join him in rebellion. He and his minions were cast out of heaven and no longer ruled the earth. They were discorporated.

God, in His mysterious wisdom, and for whatever reasons were important to Him, recreated the Earth, this time creating a man to rule over it, giving him dominion over the entire earth and every living creature. God named him Adam. God created a mate for Adam and told them to be fruitful and multiply, placing them in a lush, fertile Eden filled with everything men could possibly want, while placing only a single restriction, that they should not eat of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil.   

Covetousness, or the desire for something that is not rightfully ours, is the most dangerous passion. It leads to envy, malcontent, lust, greed, avarice, concupiscence, lasciviousness, lying, stealing, murder, and is the father of every evil thing. Adam began to covet the one thing that God had reserved for Himself, demanding that they not eat the fruit of His tree. Adam must have a taste of it.

Lucifer, now known by another name, Satan, came to Adam’s mate, Eve, one evening in Eden. He was subtle. Eve knew what God had said about the tree, and she dared not eat, but Satan asked her, “Did God really mean that you shouldn’t eat the fruit of that tree?” as he pointed towards it. “God knows that from the moment you take the first bite of it, you will be like Him,” he said, tempting her with the same temptation that had overcome him. Eve, being thus deceived, ate the fruit, then gave it to Adam.

Adam, of course, being master of Eden was watching this whole exchange. He had dominion over every living creature and could have banished Satan with a single word, but Adam himself had already coveted that which was not rightfully his. He wanted to be like God, too. Eve being deceived, had eaten the fruit and given it to her husband. Adam, not deceived, with full knowledge of what he was doing, willfully chose to disobey God.

The moment he did that, the title to the earth passed from Adam to Satan as surely as if a real estate contract had been drawn up and signed by the clients of the best of Philadelphia’s lawyers. At least, Satan had his earth back and was a king again. He gloated over his victory over Adam and God. Well, at least he gloated over his legal authority to have dominion over the earth again; he knew this had no impact on God.

Adam and Eve tried to hide what they had done. They covered themselves with fig leaves so God couldn’t see them, but this was useless. We can’t hide anything from God. The coverings they had made for themselves were not acceptable to God, so God, Himself, went out and got the skins of some wild animals to cover them. That something had to die and blood had to be shed to cover Adam and Eve’s sin was the first time that death had entered into the world. Once he opened shop, Death has had a long and prosperous business; he’s still prospering.

God, Himself, had a plan for the redemption of man. He would become a man Himself, and offer His own blood as a single, permanent sacrifice for man’s wickedness. He would reconcile mankind to Himself, by and through Himself, as a gift to all who would would partake of it, such was His love for mankind.

He took it on Himself to became a man without a human father, thus He had no stain of the sin of Adam which had passed to all men, and amid real trials and temptations such as are common to all men, He lived a sinless life as a man, thus death had no dominion over Him. He submitted to death only because He knew its eternal importance to me, to you, to all men. Since death had no dominion over Him, the grave could not hold Him, leading one of His apostles to write, “O Death! Where is thy victory? O Grave! Where is thy sting?”

He returned to Heaven as the Most High God He always was and is. When asked His name once, He said, “I AM THAT I AM.” That’s a good name to have if one can wear it. It won’t fit me, though. It’s not my name. Another time He declared, “I am the Alpha and Omega,” as one of His names.  He has many, many of them. I know Him as Jesus. I’ve met Him, and He is not me. He has His own mind and existed before me, is independent of me, and is unaffected by me. But He has another nature that inhabits me, and makes a part of me the same holy essence that is His nature. He has made me His joint-heir. He did this because He loves me with a love that is stronger than that of a mother for her own child.

Think about that for a minute. What is a joint-heir? Does not a joint-heir share equally in an undivided interest in the whole? Therefore, being undivided, since trying to divide the eternal is like trying to divide by zero and simply can’t be done, do I not have access to the whole? Is it not all mine? And if an infinite amount is all mine, is there any reason not to share as much of it as anyone else wants? Since the river of Living Water can never be drained, the Lord has said that out of us, “shall flow rivers of living water.” From one inexhaustible river comes many inexhaustible rivers . . . there is no end; there is no boundary; the room occupies more space on the inside than its external dimensions allow. Since it is infinite, trying to divide it is a futile exercise. Divide by one and you still have the whole. Infinity divided by one an infinite number of times is still infinity. Infinity divided by a thousand is still infinity. Infinity divided an infinite number of times still has the infinite as its dividend. To grasp a small piece of the infinite is to grasp all of infinity. But it’s bigger than that, because, with infinity, zero is the divisor; there is simply no beginning point and no place to end.

If one were searching for a better, more attractive conspiracy theory to have and to hold, one would be hard pressed to find it. It is there for you. It can be your faith, or it can be your fable. Whatever decision one makes will have no impact on God, or me . . . He will still be God and I will still not be God, just simply who I am. But, you are welcome to come along and share in His bounty, in fact, you can have it all if you can divide it and you can have even more of it if you can’t. Take your zero and use it as a divisor and check the results for yourself. One cannot divide the infinite, for there is no place to stand to do so. If one wants it, there is a Rock to stand on from which it can be reached, but you can’t just take your share, because your share is all of it.

I have abundant joy from the hope that is within me, the faith that is inside me. It is my faith. I will cling to it with every fiber of my being. I will not be moved, having an unwavering confidence in The One in Whom I have placed my faith, for above all, He is faithful. It’s all my flaws and blemishes that He has promised to remove as far as the east is from the west, and to claim me for Himself. How did I deserve such mercy? The answer? I don’t. He chose me from the foundation of the world. He chose us all.

There. There’s my conspiracy theory. The difference between mine and the others is that I have the freedom to choose my path. And . . . it’s a path that offers hope, not doom. It offers light, not darkness. It offers life, not death. It offers redemption, not condemnation. It offers reconciliation, not rejection. It is born of love, enacted by love, and has love as its final culmination. What’s not to like? When confronted with a decision, I simply said, “Yes, thank you.”

Perhaps that’s why the word “gospel” means “good news.”

What on earth does this have to do with CLL? Well, I have CLL and it was on MY mind. What other reason do I need? <GRIN>

NOTE: I said that envy is the most dangerous of all passions. I also said that covetousness is the most dangerous of all passions. They are inseparable, conjoined twins.