What is meant by speak to this mountain?

Question 11078

Speaking to this mountain has become one of the standard phrases of a certain kind of Christian teaching, usually meaning that a believer may address a problem out loud and command it to shift. Debt, illness, a difficult employer, all of these get labelled mountains and are duly spoken to with varying degrees of volume.

The saying comes from Jesus, so it deserves better than either the popular misuse or the embarrassed silence with which more cautious churches often treat it. What did He actually mean by this mountain, and what did His hearers understand Him to be saying?

A Recognised Figure of Speech

The first thing to establish is that removing a mountain was already a stock expression in Jewish speech long before Jesus used it. Rabbis known for solving intractable problems in the law were called uprooters of mountains. The phrase meant tackling something everyone agreed was immovable, not literal geology.

This matters because it tells us how the original hearers would have taken it. Nobody in that crowd imagined Jesus was inviting them to rearrange the landscape of Judea. The Greek oros does mean a mountain or hill, but the idiom was familiar, and idioms are understood by usage rather than by dictionary definition.

So this mountain stands for the humanly impossible obstacle. That reading loses nothing of the promise’s force. Jesus is saying that faith engages a God for whom the humanly impossible is not a category, and He is saying it to ordinary people rather than to specialists.

The Setting of the Saying

In Mark 11 the words come the morning after Jesus cursed the fig tree, and the disciples are astonished to find it withered. His response is to tell them to have faith in God, and then to say that whoever says to this mountain, be taken up and thrown into the sea, and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him (Mark 11:23).

The geography is worth noticing. They are on the road between Bethany and Jerusalem, in sight of the Mount of Olives, and possibly within view of the Herodium, a mountain Herod had literally reshaped. The fig tree episode is itself a piece of enacted judgement on a fruitless nation. This mountain, in that setting, carries overtones of the whole religious system standing in front of them.

Matthew records a related saying in a different setting, after the disciples failed to help a demonised boy. There the obstacle is their own littleness of faith, and Jesus contrasts it with a mustard seed (Matthew 17:20). Either way, the point of this mountain is the same: the size of the obstacle is not the determining factor.

What Speaking to This Mountain Is Not

It is not a technique for compelling God. Verse 24 continues with prayer, ask and believe, which locates the whole saying inside a relationship of petition rather than in the realm of spoken force. The believer is not being handed a power that operates independently of God’s will, and any reading that produces such a power has left the passage behind.

It is not a licence to name arbitrary outcomes. Verse 25 goes straight on to forgiveness of those who have wronged you, which is a curious thing to attach to a promise about unlimited power unless the two belong together. Jesus wraps the saying in dependence and in reconciliation, which are not the natural companions of self assertion.

And it is not a test of psychological intensity. The command not to doubt in your heart is often preached as though the believer must generate a state of certainty by effort, with failure explained by insufficient conviction. That turns faith into a work and lays a cruel burden on people whose prayers are not answered as they hoped. I have said more about that pattern in my answer on activating healing by speaking God’s word.

Faith That Is Real Rather Than Loud

The mustard seed comparison settles the question of quantity. If faith the size of the smallest seed in the garden is sufficient, then the promise cannot be about accumulating enough of it. What matters is not the size of the faith but the size of the God it is placed in, which is why Jesus begins with have faith in God rather than have faith in your faith.

That distinction is the whole difference between biblical faith and the counterfeit. Biblical faith is directed outwards to a person who has spoken. The counterfeit is directed inwards to the believer’s own conviction, treated as a force. One rests; the other strains. One can say if it be your will; the other regards such a phrase as an admission of weakness.

Not doubting in your heart therefore means not being double minded about God’s character, in the sense James describes when he speaks of the doubter as a wave tossed by the wind (James 1:6). It is the difference between a man who trusts his friend and a man who half suspects him.

Do Christians Still See Mountains Move?

I believe they do, though rarely in the theatrical form the phrase has acquired. I have watched congregations survive things that should have finished them, families reconciled after decades, addictions broken, hostile hearts turned. Those are the mountains that most often move, and they move in answer to prayer rather than to announcement.

I am a continuationist, so I do not tidy this away by arguing that such things stopped with the apostles. God still acts, and He still acts in response to His people asking. What I resist is the claim that outcomes are guaranteed to those who speak with sufficient force, because Scripture and experience both refuse to support it.

So when I face something immovable, I do not stand and shout at it. I take it to God, tell Him plainly what I want, submit the outcome to Him, and keep asking. That is what Jesus modelled in Gethsemane, and He is the one who taught about this mountain in the first place.

The Forgiveness Attached to the Promise

It is easy to miss what Jesus says next. Whenever you stand praying, forgive, if you have anything against anyone (Mark 11:25). The promise about this mountain is immediately followed by the reminder that unresolved bitterness sits across the channel of prayer like a blockage.

That connection is not accidental. Mountain moving faith is exercised by people in fellowship with God and with one another. A believer nursing a grievance while demanding that God perform has the relationship the wrong way round, and the New Testament repeatedly ties effective prayer to right dealing with others.

So if you want to know why a particular immovable thing has not moved, that verse is worth sitting with before any other explanation is reached for. It is not the only answer, but it is the one Jesus put closest to the promise.

Mountains in the Old Testament Background

It is worth noticing how mountains function elsewhere in Scripture, because Jesus was speaking to people saturated in those texts. Zechariah promises that before Zerubbabel the great mountain shall become a plain (Zechariah 4:7), an image of an impossible obstacle flattened before a rebuilding project that looked doomed.

The context there is instructive. The Lord adds not by might, nor by power, but by my Spirit. The mountain moves, and it moves by divine action rather than by human force. That is exactly the framework Jesus assumes when He speaks of this mountain and begins by saying have faith in God.

Isaiah uses similar language about valleys being lifted and mountains made low before the coming of the Lord. Anyone hearing Jesus talk about this mountain would have had those pictures in mind, and none of them are about human beings issuing commands to geography. They are about God clearing the way for what He has determined to do.

So the promise is enormous and it is not a lever. God moves what stands in the way of His purposes, and He invites His people to ask Him to do it. That is a better arrangement than any power we could have been handed to use on our own judgement.

So, now what?

Name the mountain honestly. Write down the thing that looks immovable in your life or in your church, and then pray about it specifically rather than in generalities. Vague prayers are difficult to answer recognisably, and much of our praying is vague because we are protecting ourselves from disappointment.

Then hand the outcome over. Ask boldly, submit gladly, forgive whoever needs forgiving, and keep asking. Faith the size of a mustard seed in the God who made the mountain is enough. What is the mountain you have stopped praying about because you assumed it would never shift?

And Jesus answered them, Have faith in God. Truly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, Be taken up and thrown into the sea, and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says will come to pass, it will be done for him.

Mark 11:22-23, ESV