THE COMBAT MANUAL

Truth, Conjunctives, & How God Actually Speaks

Taught by John Lenhart  |  flowcess.com

THIS MONTH’S READING Continue with Chapters 6–10 of Modeling God by John Lenhart. This lesson draws directly on the framework developed there — particularly the concepts of truth, conjunctives, and the nature of God as right and just. If a concept in this lesson feels unfamiliar, Modeling God goes deeper.

Is Life Black and White — or Gray?

Most people pick a side on this question. Those who like certainty say black and white. Those who pride themselves on nuance say gray. The correct answer is: both — and knowing which one applies at any given moment is one of the most practically powerful distinctions you will ever make.

To explain it, let me use a piece of research from the automobile industry in the 1990s. Product engineers discovered that the single factor most correlated with overall customer satisfaction with a car was — the cup holder. Not the engine. Not the fuel economy. Not the safety rating. The cup holder.

If the cup holder was in the right spot and held the right size drink, people were satisfied with their entire car. If it didn’t work, they hated the car regardless of everything else. That cup holder is what I call a hurdle — a minimum requirement that has to be met before anything else matters. Fall below it, and nothing you do above it counts.

Now: if adding one cup holder made people happy, would adding eighteen make them eighteen times happier? Of course not. A cup holder is not a driver — something where more genuinely produces more return. Miles per gallon is a driver. Safety is a driver. The more you give, the better people respond.

HURDLE	DRIVER
Minimum requirement — must be met	More is better — returns increase with investment
Black and white	Gray — a spectrum
A need	A want
Qualitative — acceptable or not	Quantitative — more or less desirable
Example: A working light bulb in your kitchen	Example: Miles per gallon, safety rating, cup holder position
Treating it as a driver → bankruptcy (over-investing in what just needs to be adequate)	Treating it as a hurdle → missed opportunity (spending minimum on what could generate maximum return)
Handle EFFICIENTLY — get it done, move on	Handle EFFECTIVELY — invest fully, pursue excellence

Here is where this connects to your uniqueness. Recall from the Intangible Drivers lesson that some people are effective — they want everything done as perfectly and completely as possible. Others are efficient — they want it done as quickly as possible. Neither is wrong. But the trap is applying your default mode to everything regardless of whether it is a hurdle or a driver.

If you are effective and you apply that thoroughness to a hurdle, you waste enormous time and energy perfecting something that only needed to be adequate. If you are efficient and you apply that speed to a driver, you leave significant value on the table by rushing through something that deserved real investment. The right approach: handle hurdles efficiently. Handle drivers effectively.

Hurdles are black and white — they either clear the minimum or they don’t. Drivers are gray — they reward every additional investment. Confuse the two and you either go bankrupt or miss your potential.

The Hierarchy of Truth

Before we can talk about how God speaks, we have to establish precise definitions for a set of words most people use interchangeably — which is exactly why most people cannot reliably identify truth when they encounter it. These are not arbitrary distinctions. They are a hierarchy, and each level builds on the one before.

LEVEL	DEFINITION	EXAMPLE	KEY NOTE
Data	Symbols representing characteristics	2, 3, %, $	Building blocks only — no meaning yet
Information	Processed data intended to be useful	A price tag, a temperature reading	Useful, but not yet knowledge
Knowledge	Right WHAT — a fact	“Jesus rose from the dead.”	A fact in isolation — no reason attached
Understanding	Right WHAT + Right WHY — knowing the reason	“Jesus rose so that we could be justified.”	Context and reason — still no HOW
Wisdom	Right decision or right action	“Therefore walk in newness of life.”	The correct response — connects knowledge to action
Truth	Right WHAT + Right WHY + Right HOW (how it operates)	“I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life” — plus the full mechanism of what that means and how it works	Complete. Creates. God speaks in truth — always conjunctive.
Deception	Right WHAT + Wrong or Missing WHY and HOW	“Hail, King of the Jews” — said while mocking and torturing Him	The most dangerous category — you are not deceived by a lie. You are deceived by a right WHAT with no HOW or WHY.

The most important distinction on that table — the one with the most immediate application to spiritual warfare — is the difference between truth and deception. Notice that deception is not a lie. A lie is a wrong WHAT. You are rarely fooled by a lie because it is obviously false. What actually deceives you is a right WHAT paired with a wrong or missing HOW and WHY. The fact is correct. The mechanism and purpose are not — or they are simply absent, leaving you to fill them in yourself.

THE TEENAGE TV SHOW ILLUSTRATION

There is a character that appears in almost every teenage drama — the deceiver. Their technique is always the same. They walk up to a girl and point out that her boyfriend and her best friend just came out of a back room together. That is a right WHAT — they did just come out of that room. The deceiver says nothing more. They just stare, letting the girl supply the HOW and WHY herself.

The girl concludes: he’s cheating. She erupts. She confronts. She destroys the relationship. At the end of the episode, it turns out the boyfriend and the best friend were planning her surprise birthday party.

She was not deceived by a lie. She was deceived by a right WHAT with no HOW and WHY — and she filled in the rest herself. This is how the enemy works. This is why I teach both children and adults the same defensive response: don’t fixate on the WHAT. Ask for the HOW and WHY. If someone gives you a right WHAT, ask them why they believe it and how it actually works. That question dismantles deception faster than any other tool.

THE DEFENSE AGAINST DECEPTION When someone gives you a WHAT — a fact, a claim, a piece of information — do not simply accept or reject it based on whether the fact seems true. Ask:  HOW does this work? What is the mechanism? WHY is this so? What is the reason behind it?  If they cannot answer, or if their HOW and WHY contradict the character of God or the context of Scripture, you have identified deception regardless of how true the WHAT appeared to be.

TRUTH IS A FACT THAT CREATES

Here is another way to think about it that I develop more fully in Modeling God: truth is a fact that creates. Everything in creation — every act of God that brought something into being — was done with the WHAT, HOW, and WHY all present. All destruction, throughout Scripture, is done with a wrong or missing HOW or WHY. The conjunctive is the structure of creative force. Deception is the structure of destruction.

And there is no such thing as a half-truth. A truth has all three components. What people call a half-truth is simply deception — which means the word half-truth is itself a deceptive term, because it implies there is still something truthful about it. When someone uses the phrase, they are already operating under a wrong definition, and wrong definitions slow down your thought process and damage your brain. Precision in language is not pedantry. It is self-defense.

THE PATENT ANALOGY

My favorite illustration of what truth looks and feels like is a patent. I hold three patents, and the first line on every patent application asks: what is the nature of your invention? The second line asks: would someone skilled in the art — a competent expert in this field — come up with the same idea?

If the answer to that second question is yes, you do not get the patent. One horse pulling a wagon. Two horses. Three. Four. A skilled person in the art of transportation would naturally extrapolate those variations. But zero horses — a self-propelled carriage — that is a patent. No one skilled in the human understanding of transportation at that moment would have arrived there by following the existing logic.

That is what truth feels like. It always takes the first step in the opposite direction from human understanding, and then leads to a greater understanding than human logic could have reached. This is why God’s truth consistently produces the response: “What?” — followed, after a moment of genuine thought, by “Oh.” Human understanding produces instant comprehension followed eventually by contradictions. God’s truth produces initial confusion followed by an understanding that only deepens over time and never contradicts itself.

The Conjunctive: Truth Has a Shape

Everything we have covered about truth — right WHAT, right WHY, right HOW — has a geometric expression. I call it a conjunctive. Some people call it a Venn diagram, but a conjunctive is a very specific version: one circle defines freedom, the other defines limitation, and there is always exactly one limitation.

Where the two circles overlap is the truth. Outside both circles is destruction. Inside the freedom circle only — without the limitation — is the animal thought process, the flesh. Inside the limitation circle only — without the freedom — is the human thought process, legalism and control. Only in the overlap do you have both freedom and accountability in their right relationship.

God says: eat of any tree you want — freedom — except this one tree — one limitation. That is the conjunctive. Eve says to the serpent: we cannot eat or touch this tree — two limitations. The moment there are two limitations, there is a contradiction, and contradiction is the teenager’s favorite weapon. Two limitations always generate a contradiction that someone can exploit to justify moving to full freedom.

HOW SOCIETIES AND RELATIONSHIPS BREAK DOWN

The conjunctive also explains how civilizations decay. A society starts in the conjunctive: liberty and justice for all. Freedom — liberty. Limitation — justice. Everyone lives in the overlap. Then a leader decides they would rather live in full freedom. The moment they move from the overlap into the freedom circle only, everyone else gets pushed from the overlap into the limitation circle. They now have liberty and justice for all — except for the king, to whom they have no justice. Two limitations for everyone but one. The conjunctive is broken and the decay begins.

God consistently starts people in the conjunctive, people consistently add a limitation trying to improve on it, this pushes everyone into the freedom which produces chaos and destruction, and God steps back in to restore the truth. Eden. The Law. The Prophets. Jesus. This is the arc.

THE CONJUNCTIVE ATTRIBUTE MAP

Below is a reference map of the attributes that belong to each side of the conjunctive. These are drawn from the handout John provides with this lesson. Use it to recognize conjunctives in real time — in Scripture, in conversation, in how someone defines a concept to you:

FREEDOM CIRCLE	TRUTH (Overlap) — Both Apply	LIMITATION CIRCLE
Tangible	Happiness	Intangible
Qualitative	Flow	Quantitative
Context	Dissolve	Thought Process
Unconscious		Conscious
Intuition		Logic
Knowledge		Understanding
Synthesis		Analysis
Philosophy		Science
Release		Tension
Endorphin		Dopamine
Liberal		Conservative
Hurt Self		Hurt Others
Eastern		Western
Liberty		Justice
Resolve		Solve

Notice the pairings: freedom and limitation, qualitative and quantitative, unconscious and conscious, intuition and logic, knowledge and understanding, endorphin and dopamine, liberal and conservative, hurt self and hurt others, eastern and western, liberty and justice, resolve and solve. Each pair is a conjunctive. Truth lives where they overlap. Most of the debates in theology, politics, and relationships are people arguing from inside one circle while the other person argues from inside the other — when the answer is always in the middle.

Right and just is itself a conjunctive. Right is qualitative — a matter of moral truth. Just is quantitative — a matter of balanced proportion. God is not right without being just, and not just without being right. Any conception of God that is one without the other is not the God of Scripture.

Who Speaks in Conjunctives — and Who Doesn’t

This is the part that makes everything practical for hearing from God. Once you understand what a conjunctive sounds like, you can identify the source of anything said to you — in conversation, in prayer, in your own thoughts — with remarkable reliability.

SPEAKER	LANGUAGE STYLE	IMMEDIATE REACTION	LONG-TERM RESULT
GOD	Conjunctives — freedom with one limitation. Right WHAT + Right WHY + Right HOW. May initially seem counterintuitive.	“What?” followed by “Oh.” — initial confusion, then deep clarity	Truth. Creates. No contradictions ever emerge. The more you live in it, the more it expands.
HUMANS	Understanding — right WHAT with right WHY. Logical, explanatory, makes immediate sense.	Instant agreement — “That makes sense!”	Eventually produces contradictions. The logic holds until context changes, then falls apart.
THE DEVIL	Right WHATs with wrong or missing HOWs and WHYs. May quote scripture — but stripped of context.	Compelling. Seems reasonable. You run with it.	Deception and destruction. The wrong HOW and WHY always surfaces eventually — by then the damage is done.

God always talks in conjunctives. This is testable, verifiable, and consistent. When you read something in Scripture and it immediately makes complete sense without any initial friction, ask yourself whether a human said it or whether God said it — because God’s truth consistently requires a moment of resistance before the depth of it becomes clear.

When I hear someone quote the Bible and attribute a statement to God, I evaluate the language. If it is purely explanatory — right WHAT with right WHY, but no HOW — a human probably said it. If it is a right WHAT alone, with no HOW or WHY attached — the enemy probably said it. If it initially resists my understanding and then reveals a deeper clarity than I could have reached on my own, God probably said it.

Biblical Proof: Four Passages

JOHN 5:31 — TRUTH IS MORE THAN A RIGHT FACT

Jesus says: “If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true.” Would Jesus tell a lie about Himself? No. Would He state a wrong WHAT? Never. But a right WHAT about Himself, stated by Himself, for the purpose of advancing His own agenda — that would not be truth. Because truth requires a right HOW and WHY, and facilitating your own purpose is the wrong HOW.

The Pharisees repeatedly tried to get Jesus to say outright: “I am the Son of God.” He never did — not during His earthly ministry. Not because it wasn’t true, but because saying it would have made it untrue. A person who declares their own greatness is not great. The HOW and WHY of the declaration would have been wrong. He says it after the resurrection in Revelation — where the HOW and WHY are correct, because the proof has already been established through the mechanism of death and resurrection.

If I bear witness of myself, my witness is not true. — John 5:31 (KJV)

MATTHEW 27:27-31 — RIGHT WHAT, CATASTROPHICALLY WRONG HOW AND WHY

What would you say about a group of people who placed a crown on someone’s head, knelt before them, and said “Hail, King of the Jews”? Most people would say those people were worshiping and honoring that person. Now read what actually happened:

Then the soldiers of the governor took Jesus into the Praetorium and gathered the whole garrison around Him. And they stripped Him and put a scarlet robe on Him. When they had twisted a crown of thorns, they put it on His head, and a reed in His right hand. And they bowed the knee before Him and mocked Him, saying, “Hail, King of the Jews!” Then they spat on Him, and took the reed and struck Him on the head. And when they had mocked Him, they took the robe off Him, put His own clothes on Him, and led Him away to be crucified. — Matthew 27:27-31 (KJV)

They did every right WHAT. Crown — check. Kneeling — check. Hail, King of the Jews — check. Every element of worship, performed precisely. With a wrong HOW (mockery and torture) and a wrong WHY (humiliation and execution). A fact is not a truth. You cannot evaluate the nature of something by the WHAT alone. The HOW and WHY determine everything.

JOHN 14:5-7 — THOMAS ASKS THE HOW, JESUS ANSWERS WITH TRUTH

Thomas says: Lord, we do not know where you are going. How can we know the way? Notice — he asked the HOW. And Jesus responded with perhaps the most famous single statement in all of the Gospels. But He did not stop at the WHAT. He gave the full conjunctive:

Jesus said to him, “I am the way, the truth, and the life. No one comes to the Father except through Me. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father also; and from now on you know Him and have seen Him.” — John 14:6-7 (KJV)

I am the way — WHAT. No one comes to the Father except through Me — the limitation, the HOW. If you had known Me, you would have known My Father — the WHY. All three are present. This is the structure of truth. Thomas asked a HOW question and received a conjunctive answer. Notice also that the entire passage is about knowing and thinking — because everything in spiritual life is mediated through the brain and the mind.

JOHN 4:21-24 — WORSHIPING IN SPIRIT AND IN TRUTH

But the hour is coming, and now is, when the true worshipers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. — John 4:23-24 (KJV)

Spirit and truth is a conjunctive. Spirit — the freedom side, the experiential, the relational, the unconscious dimension of worship. Truth — the limitation side, the right WHAT with right WHY and right HOW, the structured understanding of who God actually is. You cannot truly worship with only one.

Notice: “We worship what we know.” Do you know who God is? If you do, you can explain it. Not because God is limited to what you can explain — but because genuine knowledge of someone means you can give an account of them. When you pray to a God you cannot define, the HOW and WHY of your prayer determine who you are actually addressing. Saying “Oh God, who can do anything” — that is a right WHAT but a wrong HOW and WHY, because God cannot lie, cannot sin, cannot contradict Himself. The God who “can do anything” is not the God of Scripture. This is one of the central reasons for reading Modeling God.

2 TIMOTHY 2:15 — RIGHTLY DIVIDING THE WORD OF TRUTH

Be diligent to present yourself approved to God, a worker who does not need to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. — 2 Timothy 2:15 (KJV)

A workman here means someone who toils with words — words as logos, as understanding. Paul is instructing us to become people who can accurately divide truth from understanding, from knowledge, from deception, from lies. Not every sentence from a teacher is truth even if some sentences are. Not every claim that sounds scriptural is accurate. The ability to rightly divide is not a gift you receive — it is a skill you develop through sustained engagement with the conjunctive framework.

Do you know how to identify what is truth, what is understanding, what is a fact, what is deception, and what is a lie? After this lesson, you are better equipped to do that. That skill becomes the foundation for everything in the months ahead.

THE CONJUNCTIVE EXERCISE Choose a significant belief you hold — about yourself, about God, about a relationship, or about your calling. Write it down as a statement. Then ask: Is this a conjunctive? Does it have freedom AND one limitation? Is the WHAT right? Is the HOW present and right? Is the WHY present and right? What happens to the statement if you test it this way? _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________

IDENTIFY THE DECEIVER Think of a time you were deceived — not by an outright lie, but by a right WHAT with a wrong or missing HOW and WHY. What was the WHAT? What HOW and WHY did you fill in yourself? What would have happened if you had asked for the HOW and WHY before accepting the WHAT? ___________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________ _______________________________________________________________________________________________

Next month: identifying and rehearsing away your triggers — and beginning to hear from God in your specific uniqueness.

flowcess.com  |  Modeling God by John Lenhart