THE WAR JOURNAL

Section Five: Counterintelligence

By Ed Mabrie

Faith By Reason

Of all the routines that made basic training at Fort Jackson memorable — and I use the word memorable charitably — the one I found most philosophically confusing was something called fire watch.

The concept was simple. Every night, two privates from the platoon would forgo a significant portion of their sleep to walk the barracks in rotating shifts, ensuring that no fire broke out and destroyed everything. The tradition dated back to World War II, when training facilities were built from timber — sprawling wooden structures where a single spark could travel through an entire installation within minutes, killing hundreds before anyone could respond. Fire watch in that context was not a ritual. It was a genuine, life-saving necessity.

In the modern Army, however, our barracks at Fort Jackson were constructed from brick, metal, and glass, with sprinkler systems running through every corridor and building on the entire installation. The odds of an uncontrolled fire destroying anything were roughly equivalent to the odds of a spontaneous glacier forming in South Carolina in July. And yet there we were — every night, rotating through three watches, sacrificing sleep that our exhausted bodies were screaming for — in service of a fire that was absolutely never going to happen.

There were three shifts: first, second, and third watch. First and third, while still unpleasant, were at least survivable. First watch meant you stayed up a few extra hours and then got a solid run of sleep before morning. Third watch meant you were woken early but had gotten real sleep beforehand. Second watch was a form of legal torture. The moment you finally drifted into genuine sleep, someone was shaking your shoulder. You dragged yourself upright, pulled on your uniform in the dark, grabbed a flashlight, and went out to guard against the fire that was not coming.

When your watch ended, you climbed back into bed with perhaps ninety minutes remaining before reveille — not enough to get into deep sleep, just enough to lie there with your mind still racing, drifting in and out of consciousness until the alarm forced you upright again. Then a full day of physical training on what amounted to no sleep whatsoever. I had managed to draw first and third watch on my first two rotations. On my final fire watch assignment, I drew second. Naturally.

The one silver lining was that there were always two of you. You could get a head start on shining your boots, folding your gear, handling whatever tasks the days left no time for. And since you were both desperate to stay awake, conversation was inevitable.

On that last fire watch, my companion was Private Nelson — the military intelligence MOS I had mentioned in the previous section. We had not had much opportunity to talk before. That night, walking back and forth through darkened corridors with nothing to do but keep each other conscious, I asked him why he had chosen military intelligence as his specialty. It turned out it was a family legacy. His father had served in intelligence. His grandfather had been an officer in the Army’s counterintelligence division during the Korean War.

I asked him to tell me more about what counterintelligence actually meant. He was happy to explain.

What Counterintelligence Actually Does

In the era before electronic encryption, battlefield communications were conducted openly. Radio signals traveled through the air and anyone with the right equipment could intercept them. The only protection was the code — a cipher that rendered the message meaningless to anyone who could not break it. Both sides were constantly listening, constantly intercepting, constantly trying to decode.

If you successfully broke the enemy’s code, the intelligence value was immense. You knew their troop movements. You knew where they were massing. You knew their supply situation, their command structure, their next objective. You were, in effect, reading their mail in real time.

But the even more powerful move — the one Private Nelson’s grandfather had specialized in — was something beyond mere interception. If you had broken their code, you could do more than read their messages. You could write them. You could transmit communications that appeared to come from the enemy’s own headquarters, using their own codes, in their own format, giving their own troops false orders. Send the infantry to the wrong valley. Make them believe a position had been secured when it had not. Set up an ambush by leading them directly into it while they thought they were following their own command.

This is the art of counterintelligence at its most sophisticated: not merely blocking communication, not merely intercepting it, but impersonating the source so convincingly that the enemy defeats himself while believing he is following orders from his own side.

The most dangerous operation in intelligence warfare is not the one that blocks your communications. It is the one that replaces them — with a voice so convincing you never suspect it is not your own headquarters.

Private Nelson wanted to carry on the family tradition. I told him I thought that was brilliant. I also filed the concept away — because I was going to need it.

In spiritual warfare, our enemies are running exactly this operation against us. As we established in Section Four, you have a direct line of communication to headquarters through council meetings with Jehovah. The enemy knows this. And like any skilled counterintelligence operation, they have three objectives: block the signal, distort the message, or — most insidiously — impersonate the source so convincingly that you follow their instructions while believing you are following God’s.

To defend against this, you need to know the difference between the real voice and the counterfeit. That requires understanding all four voices that compete for your attention — because only one of them is God.

The Four Voices

In our daily lives, four distinct voices offer us guidance, impressions, direction, and instruction. Three of them are actively working to lead us away from God. Only one is God Himself.

The four voices are: God, the world, the flesh, and the devil. The world and the flesh are relatively transparent once you know what to look for. The enemy is a different matter entirely — he is sophisticated, studied, and intentionally mimics the voice of God. We will take each in turn.

VOICE	ORIGIN	WHAT IT WANTS FOR YOU	HOW IT SOUNDS	HOW TO RECOGNIZE IT
GOD	The Holy Spirit — causeless, arising without logical antecedent	Your growth, fulfillment of your uniqueness, and intimacy with Him — your best, not your easiest	Gentle, humble, patient, faithful. Convicts but never condemns. Meek. Offers choice. Never pressures.	Causeless — arrives out of nowhere, not from reasoning. Conforms to scripture in context. Always includes a right WHAT, a right HOW, and a right WHY.
THE WORLD	External culture — social media, peer pressure, status, appearances, money, trends	What looks best from the outside. Highest-paying, highest-status, most impressive to others.	The voices of society, culture, advertising. What the room thinks. What your friends will say. What makes you look successful.	Entirely external and traceable. Comes from magazines, people, social media, comparison. Easily identified — it always has a worldly cause.
THE FLESH	Internal desires — bodily appetites, habit, comfort-seeking, the animal and human thought processes combined	Your comfort, your pleasure, your ease. Sounds like it wants the best for you — but only the easiest version.	Sounds like you. Feels reasonable. Pushes toward comfort, lust, laziness. Harsh when resisted. Impatient, unforgiving, manipulative, envious, cowardly.	It sounds like you — but it pressures. God does not pressure. The flesh condemns when resisted; God convicts gently. Flesh avoids growth. God always moves you toward it.
THE DEVIL	Spiritual enemies — highly intelligent, studying your specific weaknesses, targeting your uniqueness	Away from God — by any means necessary. May use correct scripture, appealing logic, or shortcuts that bypass your actual mission.	Loud, intense, condemning. May quote scripture — but out of context. Offers shortcuts. Appeals to pride, lust, or fear. Mimics God’s voice but without the nature.	Gives a WHAT — may even be a right WHAT. But offers no HOW or WHY, or provides a wrong one. Always leads away from God. Never righteous, never just. Contradicts scripture’s context even when quoting it.

Voice One: The World

The world is the easiest of the three counterfeits to identify, because it is entirely external. The world is the corrupting influence of secular society — status, wealth, appearances, peer pressure, the values promoted by culture, social media, advertising, and the ambient noise of what the people around you consider success.

When you are seeking guidance — say, in prayer or a council meeting — and you ask God about a major decision like a career change, the world will offer you very clear counsel: take the job that pays the most. Take the position with the most impressive title. Choose the one that your friends and family will be most proud of. The one that lets you wear the nicer suit. The one with the better commute and the more desirable office.

None of those things are inherently evil. God has nothing against a good salary or a prestigious role. But here is what the world will never tell you to do: take the job that fits who you actually are. The world has no framework for uniqueness. It has no concept of the specific design God placed in you or the calling that flows from that design. It only knows external metrics, and it will always optimize for those at the expense of what God actually wants for you.

The voice of the world is also the easiest to trace. It has a cause. It comes from somewhere you can point to — a conversation, a social media post, a comparison you made between yourself and someone else. The moment you can identify where a thought came from, and that source is the external world, you know whose voice it is.

Voice Two: The Flesh

The flesh is considerably more deceptive than the world, because unlike the world — which is obviously external — the flesh sounds like you. It seems to have your best interests at heart. It wants you to be happy and comfortable and satisfied. It is warm. It is familiar. It can be genuinely difficult to distinguish from your own sincere desires.

In John Lenhart’s framework from the Combat Manual, the flesh operates primarily at the 160 thought process — the animal, habitual mode — sometimes combined with the 80 human thought process. It uses your rational faculties to serve your lower appetites. It is intelligent about it. The flesh does not say “go do something obviously sinful.” It says, “go do what feels good. Go toward what is comfortable. Stay where it is easy. Avoid what is hard.”

The flesh seeks comfort above all else. It wants you in a state of ease, gratification, and minimal resistance. And what God consistently wants for you is the opposite of that. God wants you to grow. Growth requires tension, difficulty, and the willingness to move toward things that cost you something. The flesh will always steer you away from that cost.

When you are praying about a spouse and you feel a strong pull toward someone who is exciting, physically attractive, and emotionally thrilling but spiritually questionable — that pull is the flesh. When you are seeking God’s will about a career and you feel drawn toward the option that requires the least effort even if it is the least fulfilling — that is the flesh. When you feel the urge to manipulate a situation rather than trust God with it — that is the flesh.

You know the flesh is speaking when you try to resist it and it pushes back harshly. God does not push. God does not pressure. But the flesh, when resisted, gets louder. It becomes impatient. It condemns you for not complying. It manufactures reasons why resistance is unnecessary or even harmful. Paul describes its works in Galatians with unsparing clarity:

I say then: Walk in the Spirit, and you shall not fulfill the lust of the flesh. For the flesh lusts against the Spirit, and the Spirit against the flesh; and these are contrary to one another, so that you do not do the things that you wish … Now the works of the flesh are evident, which are: adultery, fornication, uncleanness, lewdness, idolatry, sorcery, hatred, contentions, jealousies, outbursts of wrath, selfish ambitions, dissensions, heresies, envy, murders, drunkenness, revelry, and the like; of which I tell you beforehand, just as I also told you in time past, that those who practice such things will not inherit the kingdom of God. — Galatians 5:16-17, 19-21 (NKJV)

That is the works list. Now the diagnostic — how you know the Spirit is speaking instead:

But the fruit of the Spirit is love, joy, peace, longsuffering, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control. Against such there is no law. — Galatians 5:22-23 (NKJV)

The contrast could not be cleaner. If what you are hearing produces those fruits — love, peace, kindness, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control — you are hearing from the Spirit. If it produces the opposite, you are hearing from the flesh, regardless of how familiar or self-serving the voice sounds.

Voice Three: The Devil

The enemy is in a different category altogether. Where the world is external and obvious and the flesh is internal and familiar, our spiritual adversaries are external, highly intelligent, and specifically trained on you. They have been studying your weaknesses, your patterns, your history, and your uniqueness for a long time. They know which temptations have worked on you before. They know which voices you are most likely to trust. And unlike the world or the flesh, they are actively trying to sound like God.

They will not always be crude about it. They will use the voice God rarely uses — the loud, intense, confrontational voice that appears in Scripture only in moments of righteous judgment — and deploy it constantly, as though that is how God speaks all the time. They know that many Christians picture God as stern and demanding, so they lean into that image. They will condemn you. They will accuse you. They will speak with urgency and authority. And many believers, conditioned to think that a commanding authoritative voice must be from God, will follow it.

But here is the critical vulnerability in all enemy counterintelligence: their nature gives them away. They cannot sustain the imitation all the way through. They can produce a convincing WHAT — an instruction, a directive, even a scriptural reference. What they cannot produce is a right HOW and a right WHY. The mechanism and the purpose of the instruction will either be absent or wrong. And God, by His nature, never gives a WHAT without the HOW and WHY.

THE WHAT / HOW / WHY TEST When you receive a message and are uncertain of its source, ask three questions:  WHAT — What is being asked of me? (This may be right even from an enemy source.) HOW — How am I supposed to do this? Does the method align with God’s character? WHY — Why should this be done? Does the reasoning reflect God’s nature and purposes?  God always provides all three, and all three will be righteous and just. The enemy can fake the WHAT. They cannot consistently fake the HOW and WHY without exposing themselves.

The Best Example: The Temptation of Jesus

No passage in Scripture illustrates the mechanics of enemy counterintelligence more precisely than the temptation of Jesus in the wilderness. Jesus had been fasting for forty days. He was at his most physically depleted. And the enemy came to him — not the other way around — with three carefully constructed temptations, each one targeting a different voice.

#	VOICE USED	SATAN’S OFFER	WHAT MADE IT APPEALING	WHY IT WAS NOT FROM GOD
1	The Flesh	“Turn these stones into bread” — Jesus had fasted 40 days and was famished	Jesus could have done it. He was genuinely hungry. It seemed reasonable and harmless.	Jesus only did what the Father instructed — not what his own body demanded. The flesh has no authority over the Son of God, or over you. Response: “Man shall not live by bread alone.” (Matt 4:4)
2	The World (+ Scripture misused)	“Throw yourself off the pinnacle — the angels will catch you” (quoting Psalm 91:11-12)	Satan used real scripture. The offer appealed to status and pride — proving who Jesus was. The words were technically accurate.	Scripture was stripped of context. The verse was never about proving divine status through spectacle. A right WHAT — but no right HOW or WHY. Response: “You shall not tempt the LORD your God.” (Matt 4:7)
3	The Devil Directly	“Worship me and I will give you all the kingdoms of the world — right now, without the cross”	Satan genuinely controlled the nations through the fallen elohim. He could have delivered. It was a real shortcut to a real goal.	It bypassed Jesus’ actual mission — the cross, the resurrection, the legal reclaiming of Adam’s authority. A shortcut that would have destroyed the very thing it appeared to give. Response: “Away with you, Satan! You shall worship the LORD your God and Him only.” (Matt 4:10)

Notice the escalation across the three temptations. First the flesh — the most immediate, animal appeal. Then the world through misappropriated scripture — more sophisticated, requiring the enemy to dress himself in legitimate-sounding religious language. Finally, the enemy himself in direct negotiation — offering what he genuinely had authority to deliver, through a shortcut that would have rendered the Cross unnecessary and the entire mission void.

In each case, Jesus responded with scripture — but scripture in its correct context, wielded with full understanding of what the passage actually meant and what God’s will actually was. That is the sword of the Spirit functioning as it was designed. Not scripture as a magic phrase, but scripture as a precise instrument of truth applied to a specific lie.

And there is one more detail worth noting. The second temptation is perhaps the most instructive for our purposes, because the enemy quoted real scripture and the verse was technically accurate. Angels would indeed bear Jesus up. That is what Psalm 91 says. But the context of that promise had nothing to do with spectacle or the demonstration of divine status. The enemy used words that were true but stripped them of their meaning. This is their most common tactic. They do not need to invent lies from scratch. They simply need to borrow truth and misapply it.

A small but memorable illustration of this: I once knew of a man in a church who was wrestling with whether to pursue an inappropriate relationship with a woman in the choir named Grace. He was married. He was looking for divine permission where none existed. He opened his Bible at random and the first phrase his eyes landed on was “Grace be unto you.” He took this as his answer.

Her name was Grace. The Bible said it. God must be blessing this.

This is scripture stripped entirely of context, bent to serve a desire that God unambiguously prohibits. That is not God. That is the enemy — or the flesh — co-opting the Word of God and removing the meaning from the words. A right what, an entirely wrong how and why. Anyone who knew God’s character, knew His Word in context, and applied the WHAT/HOW/WHY test would have seen through it immediately.

The Voice of God: What It Actually Sounds Like

We have spent considerable time on what God’s voice is not. Now let us be specific about what it is.

The single most important characteristic of God’s voice is that it is causeless. Unlike the world, which comes from an external and traceable source, and unlike the flesh, which emerges from your own desires and reasoning — when God speaks, the thought arrives without a logical antecedent. You will not be able to point to the chain of thinking that produced it, because there is no chain. You may be in the shower, or mowing your lawn, or driving somewhere thinking about something entirely unrelated, and a thought will surface that directly answers a question you raised in a council meeting three days ago. Out of nowhere. From no discernible source.

That causelessness is itself a signature. It is how you know the thought did not originate in you.

The clearest biblical picture of this is from Elijah’s experience on Mount Horeb. He was at the end of himself — physically spent, emotionally exhausted, spiritually depleted. He had just witnessed something extraordinary, and now he was hiding in a cave, waiting to hear from God. What followed is one of the most instructive sequences in all of Scripture:

And He said, “Go out, and stand on the mountain before the LORD.” And behold, the LORD passed by, and a great and strong wind tore into the mountains and broke the rocks in pieces before the LORD, but the LORD was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but the LORD was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but the LORD was not in the fire; and after the fire a still small voice. — 1 Kings 19:11-12 (NKJV)

An earthquake. A whirlwind. A fire. Three phenomena that would command any human being’s complete attention — loud, dramatic, impossible to ignore. And God was not in any of them. He came in a still, small voice. A whisper. Something that required intention, stillness, and focus to hear at all.

Why would God do this? Why make Himself difficult to hear? It has everything to do with His nature and His will for us. God is a gentleman. He does not impose Himself. He does not yell to be heard. The reason His voice is quiet and requires effort to receive is because He wants the hearing of it to be a choice — your deliberate, intentional choice to shut out the noise and turn toward Him. If God were as loud as an earthquake, you would not need to seek Him. He would simply overwhelm you. And a God who overwhelms you into relationship is not offering you a relationship. He is offering you a performance.

God wants to be sought. His word is explicit about it: you will find Him when you seek Him with your whole heart. Not casually. Not as a background activity. With your whole heart. That is the posture required. And when you bring that posture to Him — in a council meeting, in prayer, in the quiet of intentional seeking — the still, small voice becomes recognizable. It becomes familiar. And as it becomes familiar, the counterfeits become easier to identify.

A Quick Diagnostic

Here is a working reference for telling the voices apart in real time:

✓  THE VOICE OF GOD	✗  NOT THE VOICE OF GOD
Causeless — arrives without logical antecedent	Traceable to a worldly cause, a fleshly desire, or intense pressure
Gentle, humble, patient	Loud, intense, demanding, urgent
Convicts without condemning	Condemns, shames, accuses, or flatters
Offers you a choice — never forces	Pressures, rushes, or makes you feel you have no option
Consistent with scripture in context	Quotes scripture out of context, or contradicts the will and character of God
Includes a right WHAT, right HOW, and right WHY	Gives a WHAT only — or gives a wrong HOW and WHY
Steadfast — does not change with the moment	Shifts based on circumstances, moods, or what you want to hear
Leads toward growth, sacrifice, and your true calling	Leads toward comfort, ease, compromise, or the shortcut
No sin attached — perfectly righteous and just	Any sin, unrighteousness, or injustice attached to it
Unique to you — fits how God made you specifically	Generic, pressuring, one-size-fits-all urgency

The Ultimate Defense: Know the Real Thing

All of the above is useful. The four-voice framework, the WHAT/HOW/WHY test, the characteristics of each counterfeit — these are practical tools and you should use them. But I want to close this section with something more important than all of them.

The best defense against enemy counterintelligence is not learning to recognize every counterfeit. It is knowing the real thing so well that no counterfeit can fool you.

A forensic accountant does not spend their career memorizing every type of fraudulent document. They spend it mastering what a legitimate document looks like — every detail, every nuance, every characteristic of the genuine article. When something fraudulent crosses their desk, they do not need to run through a checklist. They feel the wrongness immediately, because their familiarity with the real thing makes the deviation from it instantly perceptible.

That is the standard for hearing from God. Not a checklist you run through when uncertain, but such deep intimacy with His voice — through His Word, through sustained council meetings, through the ongoing relationship He designed us for — that the moment something is not Him, you simply know.

Read His Word. Study His character. Know how He speaks, how He acts, what He values, and how He moves throughout history. Know the principles behind what He says, not just the words. Know the context of His promises and commands, not just the phrases. The enemy can counterfeit a phrase. He cannot counterfeit a God he has never been able to fully comprehend.

If you know the voice of God — not just facts about God, but His actual voice — you will not be fooled by the counterfeits. There is no shortcut to that knowledge. It is built through relationship, and relationship is built through time.

In the next section of the War Journal, we move from intelligence to equipment — specifically to the armor of God, what each piece actually defends, and what it looks like to put it on in practice rather than just in theory. When you put on the full armor, you are unbeatable. That is not hyperbole. That is what the Word says.

Get ready to suit up.

Know the real thing. The counterfeits will identify themselves.