What Kind of Faith Can Move a Mountain?

Not long ago, I preached a sermon about the fig tree that Jesus cursed in Mark 11. It’s an odd story, to be sure, but when the disciples questioned Jesus about the withered tree, he told them that they could do even more astonishing things than that. They might even cause a mountain to fall into the sea, if only they had faith in God as small as a mustard seed (cf. Mark 11:22-25).

One thing that I completely forgot about—and something we don’t always understand—is that (and I pray you’ll forgive the technical jargon) the Greek genitive case has over a dozen distinct functions. My college textbook has over forty pages devoted solely to that one case.

One critical and subtle nuance of this is that “faith in God” or “faith in Christ” could also be translated as “faithfulness of God (or Christ).” Is our salvation dependent upon our faith in Christ, or is it dependent on Christ’s faithfulness? If Christ were not faithful, what good would faith in Christ even do us? But Christ is faithful, so our faith in him is justified.

In the example of Mark 11:22-25, Jesus says that someone whose faith is as small as a mustard seed can move mountains, but what does he mean? Is it faith in my ability? Is it faith in God’s ability? Faith means more than simply belief. It’s more nuanced than that.

Have you ever watched the classic 1981 adventure film “Raiders of the Lost Ark?” The main plot of the story is that the good guys (Indiana Jones and company) race against the bad guys (the Nazis) to find and recover the lost Ark of the Covenant. Forgive me if this is a spoiler, but even though the Nazis succeed in getting the Ark, they discover that it doesn’t give them the advantage they were expecting. They should have realized that whatever power the Ark might have contained was only going to work for someone whose purposes aligned with God’s. Perhaps it came as a surprise to them that their purpose did not.

It isn’t just the strength of your faith that is going to allow you to move mountains, but the faithfulness of the one to whom you pray. And even then, your prayer will only be effective if your purpose aligns with God’s. After all, wasn’t “Your will be done” part of Jesus’s own prayer?

What good would it do to tear down a mountain, anyway?

—Rick Rossing