A friend tells you her back pain is “a spirit of infirmity”. A visiting preacher announces there are ‘territorial’ spirits and ‘familiar’ spirits. In the book of Revelation we read the greeting from the seven spirits who are before his throne.

So how many kinds of spirits are there? Who gets to name them? And how would you know if somebody had simply invented one?

These are fair questions, and the Bible answers them more plainly than most of us expect.

One word, many meanings

Begin with vocabulary, because almost every muddle on this subject starts here.

The Old Testament word for spirit is rûaḥ. The New Testament word is pneuma. Both words carry a wide range of meaning, and both can mean any of the following:

• Wind or breath. Genesis 8:1 says God made a wind blow over the earth. That’s the same word.
• A person’s inner disposition. A mood, a temper, a settled frame of mind.
• A created spirit-being. An angel, or a fallen angel—what we usually call a demon.
• God’s own Spirit. The Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity.

English does the same. We speak of team spirit, a spirited horse and the Holy Spirit, and nobody is confused, because the sentence sorts it out.

Now for the crucial point. Scripture very often uses the phrase spirit of—spirit of truth, spirit of fear, spirit of divination, spirit of adoption. That small word of is doing a different job in each case. Three categories cover very nearly every occurrence.

The seven spirits of God: one Spirit in full

Revelation opens with a greeting: Grace to you and peace from him who is and who was and who is to come, and from the seven spirits who are before his throne, and from Jesus Christ the faithful witness (Revelation 1:4–5).

Look at the shape of that sentence. The Father, then the seven spirits, then the Son. This is a Trinitarian greeting, and the middle position belongs to the Holy Spirit. John isn’t smuggling seven extra beings into a blessing that otherwise names God alone.

So why seven? Two Old Testament passages stand behind it.

• Isaiah 11:2. The Spirit rests on the coming Messiah, and is described in a series of pairs—wisdom and understanding, counsel and might, knowledge and the fear of the LORD—alongside the Spirit of the LORD Himself. The ancient Greek translation of the Old Testament rounded this out to seven descriptions. One Spirit, described seven ways.
• Zechariah 4. The prophet sees a lampstand with seven lamps, and is told these seven are the eyes of the LORD, which range through the whole earth (Zechariah 4:10). Seven eyes, one God, nothing hidden from Him.

Revelation then ties the two together. The Lamb stands with seven horns and with seven eyes, which are the seven spirits of God sent out into all the earth (Revelation 5:6). Throughout Revelation, seven is the number of completeness. Seven churches, seven seals, seven trumpets. The sevenfold Spirit is therefore the one Holy Spirit in the fullness of his working—present everywhere, seeing everything, lacking nothing.

This matters. The church has always confessed the Spirit is one divine person, of one substance with the Father and the Son. To divide him into seven lesser powers is no harmless curiosity; it dismantles the doctrine of God. Sinclair Ferguson observes we come to know the Spirit chiefly through what He does—which is precisely why Scripture gives him so many titles. They’re windows onto the work of one person, not name tags for a crowd.

The spirit of infirmity: what Luke does and does not say

In Luke 13:10–17 a woman comes to the synagogue who had had a disabling spirit for 18 years. She was bent over and couldn’t fully straighten herself. Older translations render the phrase a spirit of infirmity. Jesus heals her, and then explains what had been happening: this woman, a daughter of Abraham whom Satan bound for 18 years.

So the passage does teach something many modern readers resist. A genuine physical condition had a genuine spiritual cause. We shouldn’t explain that away.

But notice carefully what the passage doesn’t teach.

Luke was a physician, and he is careful. In Luke 4:40–41 he reports Jesus healed those with various diseases and that demons came out of many—two categories, listed side by side. He does the same in Luke 6:18. If Luke thought sickness and demonic affliction were the same thing, he wouldn’t keep separating them.

The apostles are just as clear. Paul left Trophimus ill at Miletus (2 Timothy 4:20). He told Timothy to take a little wine for his stomach and frequent ailments (1 Timothy 5:23)—a prescription, not an exorcism. And Paul’s own thorn in the flesh was expressly a messenger of Satan, yet when he asked three times for its removal the answer was no, and grace was given instead (2 Corinthians 12:7–9).

That last case is worth sitting with. Here’s a satanic agent, named as such by an apostle, and the remedy isn’t expulsion but sustaining grace. Any teaching that turns every long illness into a failure of spiritual warfare lays a cruel burden on the sick, making the body a battlefield and the sufferer’s faith the chief suspect.

Familiar spirits: an old word for an old sin

The King James Version repeatedly forbids consulting familiar spirits (Leviticus 19:31; 20:6, 27; Deuteronomy 18:11). The Hebrew word is ‘ôb, and modern translations render it medium or necromancer.

The word familiar here is old English, not a description of intimacy. It comes from the Latin familiaris, meaning a household servant. A familiar spirit was an attending spirit thought to be at a medium’s beck and call, like a servant waiting in the hall. It has nothing to do with a spirit being familiar to us.

Deuteronomy 18:9–14 lists the whole apparatus Israel was to reject—divination, fortune-telling, omens, sorcery, charms, mediums, necromancers. Then comes verse 15, and it changes the whole complexion of the passage: The LORD your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among you.

That’s the heart of the matter. The ban isn’t chiefly about power. It’s about revelation. The question underneath every séance and every horoscope is the same: where will you go to hear a word about your life? God has spoken—through the prophets, and finally in His Son (Hebrews 1:1–2). To consult the dead is to say, in practice, that God’s word isn’t enough. Isaiah puts it bluntly: Should not a people inquire of their God? Should they inquire of the dead on behalf of the living? (Isaiah 8:19).

Territorial spirits: a phrase Scripture never uses

Now we come to a term that’s missing from the Bible altogether.

The expression territorial spirits is a modern coinage, popularised in the 1980s and 1990s chiefly through the work of C Peter Wagner and John Dawson and the missionaries associated with them, under headings such as strategic-level spiritual warfare, spiritual mapping and identificational repentance. The claim, in brief, is that high-ranking demons are assigned to particular cities and nations, and that evangelism will remain blocked until those spirits are identified by name, traced through the area’s spiritual history, and bound in prayer.

Let’s be fair: there is a text behind it.

In Daniel 10 the prophet prays and mourns for 21 days. An angel finally arrives and explains the delay: the prince of the kingdom of Persia withstood me 21 days, but Michael, one of the chief princes, came to help me. The angel adds the prince of Greece will come. This is plainly not a human politician. Something is going on in the unseen realm that has some relation to nations.

We should grant that. Scripture doesn’t present the world as spiritually flat. But now look at what Daniel himself actually does.

Daniel isn’t a combatant here. He’s a man on his knees who is afterwards told what had been going on. The passage describes what happened once in heaven; it doesn’t instruct believers what to do on earth. Building a method out of it means reading a story as a manual.

And there’s a passage that is the manual. Ephesians 6:10–20 is Apostle Paul’s one extended teaching on standing against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers over this present darkness. It was written to a church in a city famous for magical practice—Acts 19 records the Ephesian converts burning their books of spells. If naming and binding regional powers were the apostolic method, this is the letter in which we would find it.

Here’s what we find instead: the belt of truth, the breastplate of righteousness, shoes of readiness given by the gospel of peace, the shield of faith, the helmet of salvation, the sword of the Spirit which is the word of God, and prayer at all times for all the saints. Not one item on that list is a technique. Every one of them is an ordinary means of grace, available to even new believers.

Chuck Lowe, in his book-length study of the subject, presses exactly this point: the practice rests on inference drawn from narrative rather than on anything the letters command, and the apostles never once tell a congregation to identify or bind the spirit over its city.

There’s a pastoral danger too. When results don’t come, the diagnosis is always that some spirit was missed or some name was wrong—and confidence quietly shifts from the finished work of Christ to the quality of one’s own research.

The lying spirit and the throne above it

Two passages settle the question of who is actually in charge, and they’re startling.

In 1 Kings 22, prophet Micaiah describes a vision of the LORD’s court. God asks who will entice King Ahab to his death, and a spirit steps forward: I will go out, and will be a lying spirit in the mouth of all his prophets. God replies: You are to entice him, and you shall succeed; go out and do so. And in 1 Samuel 16:14 we read a harmful spirit from the LORD tormented Saul.

These verses are uncomfortable, and they should be handled with care. But they establish something immensely freeing. There’s no second god. The universe isn’t divided between two roughly equal powers locked in an even contest. Evil spirits are creatures, and they’re creatures on a leash.

At the same time Scripture never lets us lay the blame for evil at God’s door. The spirit lied; the spirit is the liar. Ahab had spent years assembling prophets who’d flatter him, and he got exactly what he’d cultivated. God ordains the outcome; the creature supplies the sin and owns it. John Calvin argued Satan is so entirely under God’s power, and so ruled by His bidding, that he is compelled to render him service—held, in Calvin’s image, bound and fettered.

Notice what this does to fear. If demons were free agents running their own campaigns, we’d need a map, an inventory and a specialist. If they’re creatures on a leash, under a good and sovereign God, we need the one who holds the leash.

Where all this leaves the ordinary Christian

Colossians 2:15 says of the cross: He disarmed the rulers and authorities and put them to open shame, by triumphing over them in Him. Disarmed. That’s past tense. The Christian doesn’t fight towards a victory that’s still in doubt; he stands on ground that has already been won.

David Powlison drew a helpful distinction here. He contrasted what he called the classic mode of spiritual warfare—the pattern found throughout the New Testament letters, consisting of truth, repentance, faith and obedience—with the modern deliverance model built around casting out and naming. His point was simply that the letters written to churches, telling Christians how to live under pressure, never instruct believers to identify demons or expel them by name. They tell us to repent, to believe, to obey and to stand.

So the equipment list is short, and it’s not secret.

• Scripture. The one offensive weapon Paul names, and the sword Jesus himself used in the wilderness.
• Prayer. Daniel’s actual practice, and the last item in Paul’s armoury.
• Repentance. Give no opportunity to the devil (Ephesians 4:27). Unaddressed sin gives ground; confession takes it back.
• The church. Paul’s armour is issued to a congregation, not to a lone hero. We stand together or not at all.
• Assurance. The believer is indwelt by the Spirit (1 Corinthians 6:19), sealed by him (Ephesians 1:13) and guarded by Christ, so that the evil one does not touch him (1 John 5:18).

Come back, then, to our three questions. How many kinds of spirits are there? Fewer than the market suggests—God’s own Spirit, holy angels, fallen angels, and human dispositions that Scripture also calls spirits. Who names them? God does, in His word, and by what they do rather than by rank or region. How would we know if somebody had invented one? When the name arrives with a technique attached, and the technique implies that ordinary Christians are defenceless without it.

The bent woman in the synagogue never learned the name of the thing that had held her for 18 years. She didn’t need it. She needed Jesus, and He was standing in front of her. So it is with us.

Related Reads

• Are Demonic Strongholds Real? How Do We Overcome Them?
• Jude 9: Why Do Michael and Satan Dispute Over Moses’ Body?
• Standing Firm: A Biblical, Reformed View of Spiritual Warfare
• Is “Deliverance Ministry” Biblical or Dangerous? The New Exorcism Trend
• Are Angels Real? Reformed Views on the Spirit Messengers
• When Demons Ask Permission: What Mark 5 Reveals About Jesus