The Mountain Jesus Pointed At
Mark 11:23 and the Verse That Comes Next
Two miles of road ran between Bethany and Jerusalem, and in the last week of His life Jesus walked it more than once. The road climbs over the Mount of Olives, and when you come over the top, the city is right there across the valley. The biggest thing in view is the temple, sitting on its own mountain.
On one of those mornings Jesus was hungry. He found a fig tree covered in leaves with no fruit on it, and He spoke to it. Then He went into the temple and turned over the tables. The next morning they came back over the same road, and Peter saw the tree dried up from the roots. "Rabbi, look!" That's when Jesus said it.
So Jesus answered and said to them, "Have faith in God. For assuredly, I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, 'Be removed and be cast into the sea,' and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that those things he says will be done, he will have whatever he says." (Mark 11:22-23)
I Grew Up on This Verse
I grew up on Mark 11:23. I was taught that the mountain was whatever stood in your way, the diagnosis or the bill or the door that wouldn't open, and that if you said the right words and didn't let doubt in, it had to move. I was told to start small, so I started with an anthill. I never moved it a centimeter.
If that's how you learned it, you learned it from people who loved God and wanted you to trust Him, and that's a good thing to want. But here's what I tell my own church. You don't get to quote verses 23 and 24 without verse 25. And verse 25 is right where most of us were taught to stop reading.
Keep Reading Past Verse 24
Therefore I say to you, whatever things you ask when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you will have them. And whenever you stand praying, if you have anything against anyone, forgive him, that your Father in heaven may also forgive you your trespasses. (Mark 11:24-25)
Jesus doesn't change the subject. He's still talking about a man standing there praying, and the very next thing out of His mouth is forgiveness. You could read verse 25 as a separate reminder tacked onto prayer, but whenever you stand praying ties it straight back to the prayer He just described. So keep one question in your head as you read those verses together. What did Jesus think was the one thing nobody standing on that road could do?
Look at the week He'd just had. He cursed a tree that had leaves and no fruit. He walked into the place where Israel brought its sin to be dealt with and called it a den of thieves. Mark tells the fig tree story in two halves and puts the temple in the middle, so you can't read one without the other. And when Jesus says this mountain, the mountain in front of Him is the one the temple stood on. And the prophets had already told Israel where God would put their sin.
He will again have compassion on us, and will subdue our iniquities. You will cast all our sins into the depths of the sea. (Micah 7:19)
A mountain thrown into the sea, spoken within sight of the altar, followed in one breath by forgiveness. Under the law of Moses that mountain didn't move. Blood ran on it every day, and Hebrews says those sacrifices could not take sin away. Verse 25 tells you how forgiveness worked on that side of the cross. Forgive, so that you'll be forgiven. The whole weight sat on you, and it was more than anyone could carry. (Your Bible may also have a verse 26 saying the same thing in the negative. Many of the oldest manuscripts don't include it, so I'm not building anything on it. Verse 25 makes the point by itself.)
What About Matthew's Version?
If you want the strongest case for the blank-check reading, it's Matthew's telling of the same morning. There's no forgiveness line there. It ends like this:
And whatever things you ask in prayer, believing, you will receive. (Matthew 21:22)
That's a fair verse to raise, and I'd rather face it than skip it. Two things. Matthew's version, read on its own, doesn't tell you what the mountain is. He'd already put forgive-so-you'll-be-forgiven in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 6:14-15). Mark keeps it in the same breath, and Mark 11 is the passage people quote. And moving mountains was a way people talked about the impossible. Paul uses it that way in 1 Corinthians 13:2, and Jesus uses it in Matthew 17:20 after the disciples couldn't cast out a demon. So I'm not claiming "mountain" means sin everywhere it shows up. I'm saying that in Mark 11, the impossible thing Jesus names in the next breath is forgiveness. You can still bring Him the bill and the diagnosis, and Paul tells you to bring Him everything (Philippians 4:6). Mark 11 just isn't a lever for it, and faith was not built to be spent that way.
How the Mountain Moved
One chapter earlier, a rich young man walked away from Jesus, and the disciples asked who could possibly be saved. Jesus answered, "With men it is impossible, but not with God" (more on that conversation here). Mark 11 is the same problem, and this time Jesus sets it on a mountain and tells you it can move.
So how does a mountain nobody can push get moved? Jesus answers in verse 23, before He ever gets to verse 25. Not by pushing, and not by forgiving enough people. By believing, and He told them what to believe in before He said anything about mountains. Have faith in God. Paul picks up the same two pieces, the heart and the mouth, and tells you what they were for.
…that if you confess with your mouth the Lord Jesus and believe in your heart that God has raised Him from the dead, you will be saved. For with the heart one believes unto righteousness, and with the mouth confession is made unto salvation. (Romans 10:9-10)
I've written about that heart and mouth before.
A few days after that walk, the One who said it carried the mountain out of the city Himself. It moved because of what Jesus did, once and for all. Faith doesn't push it. Faith is how you find out it's gone. That's why you're perfectly right with God today, and not because your forgiving others finally added up.
That flips the order of forgiveness, too. Paul writes, forgiving one another, even as God in Christ forgave you (Ephesians 4:32). You forgive because you're forgiven, not so that you will be. That doesn't make it easy. Some debts you let go of once and they're gone. Others come back up with a name at Thanksgiving, and you let go of that one again.
Peter walked on into the city that morning. The fig tree was dead, the temple was busy, and the mountain hadn't moved an inch that anyone could see. By the end of the week it had, and it went exactly where Micah said it would go.