Jesus rebuked the unclean spirit, saying to it, “You mute and deaf spirit, I command you, come out of him and never enter him again.”

Mark 9:25

Jesus here performs one of his many exorcisms in the gospels. This time it with a boy with a spirit who makes him mute and causes him to have seizures. I want us to pay attention to the mechanics of the way he performed his deliverance, particularly this detail:

For those interested in more about practical demonology, I would recommend Carlos Annocondia’s Listen to Me, Satan!

Jesus, when delivering the boy, called out the demon by name.

He called the demon a “mute and deaf spirit.” I think this is insightful revelation into the spirit realm.

It seems plausible to suggest that there are demons who have a specific task assigned to them. For this boy it was not just any ol’ demon that was oppressing him, but specifically, as Jesus describes, a “mute and deaf spirit.”

There’s a reason why I think people operating in deliverance ministries have a vocabular of rebuking the “spirit of x” or the “spirit of y”. I find it useful to gain insight into what type of demon I’m working with when performing deliverance.

I just wanted to point out from this passage how that seemed to be Jesus’ strategy when performing exorcisms.