What is meant by speak to this mountain?
Question 11078
Few sayings of Jesus have generated more theological confusion, or more outright misuse, than His statement about speaking to mountains. Prosperity preachers have turned it into a spiritual technique. Sceptics have treated it as evidence of failed promises. Neither response does justice to what Jesus was actually saying, or the rich background from which He was drawing.
A Recognised Figure of Speech
When Jesus told His disciples that faith the size of a mustard seed could say to a mountain, “Move from here to there,” and that it would move (Matthew 17:20), He was drawing on a well-established Jewish idiom. Rabbinic literature regularly used mountain-moving as a metaphor for the resolution of what seemed impossible. A scholar who could unravel a particularly knotty problem was called an “uprooter of mountains.” The disciples would have understood immediately that Jesus was not issuing instructions for geological relocation. He was speaking about the removal of obstacles that, from a merely human perspective, appear immovable.
The specific instance in Matthew 17 is illuminating. The disciples had failed to cast out a demon-afflicted boy, and they asked Jesus privately why they had been unable to do so. His answer was unsparing: “Because of your little faith.” The “mountain” in that context was the spiritual obstacle before them, not a geographical feature. The disciples’ failure was not a deficiency in technique but a deficiency in genuine trust in God.
The Mark 11 Context
The other well-known instance, in Mark 11:23, comes in the aftermath of the withering of the fig tree and in the charged atmosphere of the temple cleansing. Jesus and His disciples passed the withered tree the following morning and Peter remarked on it with astonishment. Jesus used the moment to teach about prayer and faith: “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.” The mountain in view may carry specific resonance with the Mount of Olives or the Temple Mount itself, both loaded with significance in Jewish eschatological expectation. The broader point is that the obstacles standing between God’s people and the fulfilment of God’s purposes are not final, when approached in genuine faith and prayer.
The following verse anchors what Jesus means: “Whatever you ask in prayer, believe that you have received it, and it will be yours” (Mark 11:24). The word translated “believe” is in a present continuous form. This is not a one-off act of mental assertion but an ongoing posture of trust. And the prayer is directed to God, not at the mountain. The mountain does not hear a command; God hears a prayer.
What This Is Not
The prosperity gospel has seized on these verses to construct a theology of positive confession, in which the believer’s words carry inherent power and God is more or less obligated to bring them to pass. On this reading, speaking to the mountain is a spiritual technology that works when operated correctly by a sufficiently faith-filled believer. This is a serious misreading at every level. It transforms prayer into manipulation, reduces God to a force to be activated by the right verbal formula, and places the locus of power in the believer’s words rather than in God’s character and purposes.
The Bible consistently qualifies answers to prayer by their conformity to God’s will. John’s first letter makes this explicit: “If we ask anything according to his will he hears us” (1 John 5:14). James identifies the motive behind the asking as decisive: “You ask and do not receive, because you ask wrongly, to spend it on your passions” (James 4:3). Far from teaching that any request made with sufficient confidence will be granted, Scripture shapes the believer’s prayer into alignment with God’s own purposes. The “mountain” that genuinely gets moved is the one standing in the way of what God intends, not the one standing in the way of what we want.
Faith That Is Real
Jesus’ target in both passages is the same: the disciples’ faith was small not because it lacked emotional intensity but because it lacked genuine rootedness in God. The mustard seed is the smallest of seeds, yet it becomes a tree. The point is not that a tiny amount of faith mechanically produces large results. The point is that even genuine, small faith, when it is truly placed in God, connects with infinite power. The issue is always the object of faith, not its quantity. Faith in a large God can move mountains. Confidence in one’s own spiritual performance cannot.
So, now what?
When Jesus speaks of moving mountains, He is issuing an invitation to honest, dependent, persistent prayer directed toward God. The Christian who faces what genuinely appears to be an immovable obstacle, whether in personal life, in ministry, or in the circumstances surrounding them, is not told to muster sufficient positive feeling or to repeat a verbal formula until it works. They are told to bring the thing to God in genuine faith, without doubting in the heart, and to trust that God hears and acts in accordance with His own perfect wisdom and will. The mountain may move. It may be revealed, in time, that the mountain was not the obstacle it appeared to be. What does not change is the call to bring everything to God in prayer and leave the outcome with Him.
“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 11:23