THE WAR JOURNAL

Section Four: Council Meetings with Jehovah

By Ed Mabrie

When you enlist in the Army, one of your first decisions is choosing an MOS — your Military Occupational Specialty. This is the role you will carry once initial training is complete. The MOS system uses a numeric and alphabetic code based on the NATO phonetic alphabet — Alpha, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, Echo, Foxtrot, and so on — to designate every available position in the armed forces.

One evening near the end of a particularly grueling day, our drill sergeants gathered the platoon together and went around the room asking each of us our MOS. The answers came quickly and with the confidence of young men who had convinced themselves they were ready for whatever was coming.

“Private Williams!”

“11-Bravo, Drill Sergeant.”

The drill sergeant grinned. “Eleven Bullet Stopper. Good luck, son.” 11-Bravo is infantry — the men at the absolute front of combat, the ones who make first contact. Think of the opening minutes of Saving Private Ryan. Those men on the beach at Normandy. That was 11-Bravo.

“Private Jenkins?” “19-Delta. Cavalry.”

“Gonzalez?” “74-Delta, Drill Sergeant. Nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare.”

“O’Shea?” “98-Bravo, Drill Sergeant. Ammunition specialist.”

“Sherman?” “68-Whiskey. Field medic.”

“Ellis?” “91-Bravo. Wheeled vehicle mechanic.”

Then he came to me. I flashed back immediately to the day I sat in the recruiter’s office with a large book of MOS codes spread on the desk between us. The recruiter leaned forward and asked: “So son — what do you want to specialize in?”

I looked him dead in the eye and said: “Which one puts me in the least likely position to get shot at?”

He rolled his eyes and sighed the sigh of a man who had heard it all. “Personnel record specialist,” he said flatly.

“75-Delta, Drill Sergeant!” I answered, with perhaps a bit too much satisfaction.

The drill sergeant looked at me the same way the recruiter had. “Secretary,” he muttered. The platoon laughed. I was fine with that.

Then he turned to the last man. “Private Nelson, what’s your MOS?”

“35-Foxtrot, Drill Sergeant. Military intelligence.”

The drill sergeant actually laughed at that one. “Military intelligence? Son, that’s an oxymoron.” It was a well-worn joke among the brass, and everyone knew it. But behind the mockery, the truth is exactly the opposite: intelligence is one of the most critical functions in the entire theater of war.

Why Intelligence Wins Wars

When you are in the heat of a firefight, your perspective is brutally narrow. You can see what is directly in front of you. You are taking fire. You have seconds to make decisions. You have no access to the big picture — where the enemy is massing, whether the road ahead is clear or mined, whether you are close to your objective or headed in entirely the wrong direction. You are, in the most literal sense, operating in the dark.

Intelligence changes that. The people back at headquarters have a completely different vantage point. They have helicopters and drones. They have maps and satellite imagery. They can see the whole battlefield simultaneously — and they can talk to you through your walkie-talkie and tell you exactly what you cannot see from where you are standing.

They can tell you what the enemy’s movements are. How close you are to victory or defeat. Whether the road ahead is clear. Whether you should advance or pull back. What tactics will work in your specific situation. Whether there are civilians to protect and where they are. And if you are running low on ammunition or supplies, they can make sure reinforcements reach you.

In short, intelligence provides the single most valuable commodity in combat: information. Not courage. Not firepower. Information.

The most powerful thing you can have in a battle is not a better weapon. It is a better perspective than your enemy — someone who can see what you cannot.

In spiritual warfare, we have our own direct line to headquarters. It is not a walkie-talkie. It is something far more powerful, far more personal, and — for reasons we are about to explore — tragically underused by almost every Christian alive today.

It is called a council meeting.

What Is a Council Meeting?

A council meeting, in the context of spiritual warfare, is direct access to the throne room of Jehovah — where you can ask questions and receive answers, receive guidance on your specific situation, gain intelligence on the enemy forces arrayed against you, and experience the fellowship with God that was His intention for humanity from the very beginning.

Before we go further, let me be precise about what a council meeting is not. It is not prayer. Prayer is critically important, and we will cover it extensively in Phase Two when we move to offense — prayer is petitioning God, asking Him to act on your behalf, calling on His justice. A council meeting is something different. A council meeting is fellowship. It is intelligence. It is the two-way conversation that God has been longing to have with you since before you were born.

COUNCIL MEETING VS. PRAYER Prayer = petitioning God to act on your behalf through justice and provision. Council Meeting = direct two-way fellowship with Jehovah — asking questions, receiving answers, sharing your story, and accessing divine intelligence about your situation. Both are essential. They are not the same thing.

The Three Barriers — Why Almost Nobody Does This

If we have unlimited right to be in the counsel of God at any moment we choose — receiving intelligence, getting guidance, having the deepest possible fellowship with our Creator — why don’t we? Why is this possibly the first time you have ever heard of any of this? Why isn’t it taught in churches?

There are three primary barriers, and they build on each other.

#	BARRIER	WHAT IT IS
1	Ignorance of Existence	99% of Christians do not know that God has a divine council at all. It is not widely taught — and even where it appears in Scripture, most pastors do not tread there. Dr. Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm is perhaps the finest modern treatment of this subject.
2	Ignorance of Our Right	Many Christians who do know the divine council exists assume it is for angels only. They do not know that Jesus restored our access to the council that Adam and Eve originally held — and that through Him, we can enter boldly, not as guests, but as rightful members.
3	Not Knowing How to Access It	Even those who know the council exists and that they have a right to be there often have no practical framework for how to enter intentionally. That is exactly what this section addresses.

On that last barrier — the lack of a supernatural worldview in most mainstream churches: if you strip the supernatural out of the Bible, you are left with a very strange self-help book. The entire text is saturated with spiritual activity, council meetings, divine interventions, and Elohim at every turn. You cannot understand what the Bible is actually saying without a framework for the supernatural. As my mentor, Dr. Michael Heiser, wrote in The Unseen Realm, which I strongly recommend to every student in this course, the divine council is not a peripheral footnote. It is a load-bearing wall.

The Biblical Evidence: God’s Council Is Real

1 Kings 22:19-23 — The Council in Action

We are in the time of the Israelite kings. Most of them were mediocre at best, and one of the worst was Ahab — an idol worshiper, a coward, and by most biblical accounts a genuinely despicable human being. Jehovah had reached the end of His patience with Ahab and determined it was time for him to die.

A prophet named Micaiah was given a vision of how this would happen — and what he saw is one of the most explicit depictions of the divine council anywhere in Scripture:

Then Micaiah said, “Therefore hear the word of the LORD: I saw the LORD sitting on His throne, and all the host of heaven standing by, on His right hand and on His left. And the LORD said, ‘Who will persuade Ahab to go up, that he may fall at Ramoth Gilead?’ So one spoke in this manner, and another spoke in that manner. Then a spirit came forward and stood before the LORD, and said, ‘I will persuade him.’ The LORD said to him, ‘In what way?’ So he said, ‘I will go out and be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets.’ And the LORD said, ‘You shall persuade him, and also prevail. Go out and do so.'” — 1 Kings 22:19-22 (NKJV)

Look carefully at what is happening here. Jehovah is on His throne. The heavenly host — Elohim — are gathered around Him on both sides. He asks a question. Multiple members of the council respond with different ideas. One comes forward with a specific proposal. God listens, evaluates it, and accepts it. This is not God issuing a decree from on high. This is a council meeting — active, collaborative, multi-directional.

Does Jehovah need their input? No. He is omniscient. He knew what the answer would be before the question left His mouth. But He asked anyway — because this is what He does. He delights in sharing His authority with others. He delights in getting different perspectives. He wants to interact with each intelligent being He has made, uniquely and genuinely. That is who He is.

Psalm 82 — God Presides Over the Council

God stands in the congregation of the mighty; He judges among the gods. — Psalm 82:1 (NKJV)

Here we see Jehovah presiding over His council — not this time in deliberation, but in judgment. The Elohim under His authority have failed in their responsibilities and He is rendering sentence. This is still a council meeting — God in a formal setting, engaging directly with the members of His heavenly assembly, issuing verdicts in their presence.

Revelation 4 and 5 — The Council at the End of the Age

When John is taken up into the throne room in the book of Revelation, what he sees is another council meeting — this one of cosmic significance. Elders seated on thrones. Cherubim, the throne guardians, encircling God. The entire heavenly host is present and engaged as Jesus takes the scroll that is the title deed to the earth.

Immediately I was in the Spirit; and behold, a throne set in heaven, and One sat on the throne. And He who sat there was like a jasper and a sardius stone in appearance; and there was a rainbow around the throne, in appearance like an emerald. Around the throne were twenty-four thrones, and on the thrones I saw twenty-four elders sitting, clothed in white robes; and they had crowns of gold on their heads. — Revelation 4:2-4 (NKJV)

This scene connects directly back to what Daniel witnessed hundreds of years earlier — the heavenly court convened, thrones set in place, books opened, and the Ancient of Days presiding as the Son of Man received the nations as His inheritance. What John sees in Revelation is the execution of the verdict declared in Daniel’s vision. Two council meetings — one where the sentence was announced, one where it was carried out. Both documented. Both witnessed by prophets granted access to what is normally hidden.

And the consistent pattern across all of these passages is the same: whenever we see Jehovah in the spiritual realm, He is never alone. He is always surrounded by other intelligent beings, always engaged with them, always sharing the moment with them. God is not a lone wolf. He never has been. Fellowship — real, genuine, multi-directional fellowship — is built into His nature.

Our Right to Be There

At this point, a reasonable question arises: the council in all of these passages is populated by angels — Elohim, cherubim, heavenly elders. What does any of this have to do with us?

It Started With Adam and Eve

The access to God’s council did not always belong exclusively to the heavenly host. Before the Fall, human beings had it too. We see this in two places.

The first is Ezekiel 28, where Jehovah gives a lament against the Nachash — the entity we know as Satan — and says, “You were in Eden, the garden of God.” But Eden, as Ezekiel describes it, was not simply a pleasant park. It was a garden on a mountain. And that mountain was a cosmic mountain — the place where heaven and earth intersected, where God’s throne was located. When God says Eden was where He walked with Adam and Eve in the cool of the day, He is describing council meetings. That daily walk was not casual strolling — it was intimate fellowship, the sharing of stories, guidance, and relationship at the point where the physical and spiritual realms met.

Adam and Eve were the earthly representatives on Jehovah’s council. That standing was intended to be inherited by every human being born after them — each generation adding to the council, each human being having a unique place in that fellowship. Then came the Fall. And that access was severed.

Job’s Near Miss — and What It Teaches Us

Even after the Fall, when full council access was lost, the expectation remained that human beings should try to reach God. The Book of Job illustrates this with painful clarity — and with a lesson that most people who read Job completely miss.

The common interpretation of Job is that it exists to explain why good people suffer. That reading fails on its own terms: Job never learns why he suffered. He never hears about the conversation between Jehovah and the Ha-Satan at the beginning of the book. If the purpose were to explain innocent suffering, Job got no explanation. So that is not the point.

We discover the actual point of the Book of Job in how it ends. After losing everything — his children, his wealth, his health — Job spends the bulk of the book in conversation with his companions, asking them to explain his suffering. They all give the same wrong answer: you must have sinned. Job protests repeatedly that he has done nothing wrong. Then Jehovah appears and confronts Job — and here is the thing that surprises most readers: God is angry.

Why? Job has lost everything, including his children. Why would a good God be angry with this man? The answer is precisely stated: God is not angry at Job’s suffering. He is angry at Job’s response to it. Job, faced with the most devastating circumstances of his life, never once turned to God and asked: “Why is this happening?” He asked his companions. He asked the air. He argued with his friends for chapter after chapter. But he never went to God.

God’s anger at Job was not about what happened to him. It was about the fact that Job never came and asked. That is exactly what God wanted — and exactly what Job withheld.

Job’s response after God’s confrontation is one of the most quietly momentous lines in all of Scripture. He says: “From now on I will ask of You and expect an answer.” He was not doing that before. And now he declares that he will. That is the point of the book. We are supposed to go to God with our questions. We are supposed to expect an answer. Anything less is a disappointment to the God who made us for fellowship.

Jesus Restored What Adam Lost

The good news — the extraordinary news — is that what Adam’s failure closed, Jesus’s victory reopened. One of the central purposes of the Cross and the Resurrection was to undo the damage of the Fall and restore humanity to the Edenic state that Jehovah always intended.

That restoration includes council access. Through Jesus, we can enter the throne room of God not as guests, not as observers, but as rightful members. The Apostle Paul makes this explicit:

Let us therefore come boldly to the throne of grace, that we may obtain mercy and find grace to help in time of need. — Hebrews 4:16 (NKJV)

Notice the word. Not timidly. Not tentatively. Not with the hesitance of someone who suspects they are not really welcome. Boldly. As someone with a right to be there. Because you do. That access — that bold, unconditional, unrestricted access to the very throne of God — is yours through Christ. And if you are not using it, you are leaving behind the single most powerful resource available to any human being alive.

How to Enter a Council Meeting

Knowing the council exists, and knowing you have the right to be there, brings us to the third barrier: how to actually do it. Here is what the early stages look like. As you build your uniqueness knowledge through this course and deepen your experience with these meetings, the process will become increasingly intuitive. But right now, as you are just beginning, you need a structured approach.

#	STEP	WHAT IT MEANS
1	Be Intentional	Set aside dedicated time in a quiet, private space with no distractions. This is not casual. You are entering the throne room of the Creator of the universe.
2	Set Your Mind	Deliberately orient your thoughts. Remind yourself where you are going and Who you are meeting. Intentionality is everything in the early stages.
3	State Your Will — Out Loud	Speak it: “Father God, Jehovah — I want to enter into Your council. I want the fellowship that is my right through Jesus.” The Law of Words applies here. Speak it into being.
4	Visualize the Throne Room	You have never physically been there, but your mind’s eye can set the stage. Picture a throne radiating brilliant light. Picture the Elohim around it, alert and attentive. Don’t picture an old man — picture light. Pure, luminescent, living light.
5	Enter with Thanksgiving	Psalm 100:4 — enter His gates with thanksgiving. Begin by acknowledging what God has done for you. Gratitude focuses you on who He is and validates Him. He delights in being recognized, just as you do.
6	Enter His Courts with Praise	Praise is elevation. It is acknowledging God’s grandeur and His place in your life. Praise is how you move from the physical into the spiritual. Your words — intentional, spoken words — carry you from this terrestrial world into the throne room.
7	Share on Yourself	Do not begin by asking for things. Begin by walking with God. Tell Him about your day. Share your victories, your challenges, your struggles. He already knows all of it — but He wants to hear it from you, in your voice, from your perspective.
8	Ask and Expect an Answer	Once you are present, ask your questions. About spiritual warfare, your relationships, your calling, your decisions. Then watch for the response — it may come immediately, or days later. Either way, expect it. Job’s great failure was never asking.
9	Recognize His Voice	God speaks to you in your uniqueness. A Perceiver hears through awareness. A Teacher hears through understanding. An Exhorter hears through vision. The answer may be a thought that arrives without cause — not your own reasoning, just a sudden clarity. That is Him.
10	Be Grateful for the Answer	When the guidance comes — acknowledge it. Thank Him. God has feelings. He delights in being cherished and appreciated. Gratitude after a council meeting makes Him eager for the next one. That exchange becomes a cycle that grows stronger over time.

A Note on How God Speaks Back

One of the most common questions about council meetings is: how will I know when God is answering? The detailed answer to this question is the subject of the next War Journal — because there is a great deal to cover, including how to distinguish the voice of God from the counterintelligence the enemy will actively deploy to confuse and deceive you.

But for now, here is the essential principle: God’s voice will be causeless.

By causeless I mean that when a genuine answer comes from God, it will not be traceable back to your own reasoning. It will not be the conclusion of a chain of logic you were already following. It will arrive as a thought — a sudden, clear impression — that appears without a cause you can account for. It may sound like your own voice. That is not a sign that it is not from God. Remember: He speaks to you in your uniqueness. He meets you where you are. He communicates in a way that resonates specifically with how He made you.

If you are a Perceiver, He may speak through sudden awareness — a truth you were not looking for simply appearing in your mind. If you are a Teacher, He may speak through understanding — the WHY behind something suddenly becoming clear. If you are an Exhorter, He may speak through vision — a picture of what could be, arriving with unusual vividness and energy. If you are a Compassion, He may speak through feeling — a deep inner sense that carries meaning beyond words. If you are a Server, He may speak through opportunity — a clear sense of exactly what needs to be done.

The answer may not come during the meeting itself. It may arrive days later — through a thought that surfaces without context, through a Bible passage that speaks directly to something you shared, or through another person who says something that could not possibly be coincidence. Once you have had a private council meeting, you will recognize the answers when they come — because they will connect directly to what only you and God discussed.

RECOMMENDED RESOURCE Dr. Michael Heiser’s The Unseen Realm (Lexham Press) is the most thorough and accessible treatment of the divine council in modern scholarship. Every student of this course is strongly encouraged to read it. Heiser spent his career demonstrating that the supernatural framework underlying Scripture — the divine council, the Elohim, the cosmic conflict — is not fringe theology. It is the water the entire biblical text swims in.

The Enemy’s Counterintelligence

Here is something that should come as no surprise at this point in the course: the moment you begin actively pursuing council meetings, the enemy will respond. He knows — perhaps better than most Christians do — how powerful this access is. And like any competent military adversary, he will run counterintelligence operations specifically designed to interfere with your communications.

In conventional warfare, counterintelligence aims to do one of several things: block the communication entirely, distort it so the message is garbled, or — most insidiously — intercept and replace it with false information that leads you toward defeat while believing you are headed toward victory.

The spiritual equivalent of all three of these things is real. The enemy will attempt to drown out God’s voice with noise, doubt, and distraction. He will send counterfeits that mimic the feeling of divine communication but lead in wrong directions. And he will do everything in his power to make you give up on council meetings before they become a habit — because a Christian who has mastered council meetings is extraordinarily dangerous to his kingdom.

So how do you tell the voice of God from the voice of the enemy? How do you run counterintelligence against the counterintelligence? That is the entire subject of the next section of the War Journal. Get ready for it.

You have a right to the most powerful intelligence available in the universe. God is waiting. The council is open. Stop sending your questions to people who cannot see the whole battlefield.

Come boldly. He is expecting you.