The Importance of Correct Exegesis

Are You Blessing Or Cursing?

²² And Jesus answered saying to them, “Have faith in God. ²³ Truly I say to you, whoever says to this mountain, ‘Be taken up and cast into the sea,’ and does not doubt in his heart, but believes that what he says is going to happen, it will be granted him. ²⁴ Therefore I say to you, all things for which you pray and ask, believe that you have received them, and they will be granted you. Mark11:22-24

Pretty clear, right? Whatever we ask for in prayer, if we just believe, it will be given to us. What people think is impossible, picking up a mountain and casting it into the sea or literally, whoever speaks to a mountain, “be thrown into the sea,” if he believes, it will happen. In other words, nothing is impossible with faith.

Friends that is not what Jesus is saying at all. Your faith, great or small, in abundance or lacking, is most often not the point.

This passage of Scripture – Mark 11:20-25 – and its parallels is one of the most abused passages in the Bible. It is particularly abused by Word Faith advocates and even by those who have no idea what Word Faith is but who nonetheless subscribe to a wrong interpretation.

The central issue is an abandonment of accurate language studies. Verses 22-24 is the crux of the issue. Christians, without considering the implications of what they are saying, will most often interpret these verses as saying that if they ask for something in prayer and harbor no doubts, then God will necessarily grant their request.

Such an interpretation turns the divine-human relationship on its head. In other words, it makes God our sugar-daddy, our cosmic vending machine. God becomes the servant of every human desire and is no longer our sovereign Lord.

The error of the Word Faith people begins in verse 22 where we read: “have faith in God.” The Greek there is echete pistin theou. The NASB, KJV, ESV, and NIV translate this phrase correctly.

What Word Faith teachers do is re-interpret “have faith in God” to "have the faith of God” or “have the God kind of faith.” Then to compound their error, they place a kind of magical characteristic upon the spoken word.

That’s why you will hear some people say things like “release your faith” or “speak your faith” or “you can have what you say.” Kenneth Copeland is fond of screaming “money come to me!”

• This is “positive confession.”

• This is a form of “mantra” akin to occultism.

• Nowhere in the Scripture are we told to do these things.

Speaking of the Copelands, Kenneth’s wife, Gloria, said this about the Mark 11 passage we are looking at:

“I can’t think of anything that changed my life more after I was born again and filled with the Spirit than learning how to release faith, because this is the way you get anything – healing, money, the salvation of your children, the salvation of your husband or your wife – anything you’re believing for, it takes faith…to cause heaven to go into action…It says in Mark 11…remember, now, the message was you can have what you say. You can have what you say…Here’s the Scripture…For verily I say unto you, that whosoever shall say unto this mountain, Be thou removed and be thou cast into the sea, and shall not doubt in his heart, but shall believe that those things which he saith shall come to pass, he shall have whatsoever he saith. I say – look at that, say, say, saith, saith, say – I say unto you, what things soever you desire when you pray, believe that you receive them, and you shall have them. Man!”[1]

Now, I don’t want to get too technical here so let me just say this: the grammar does not say what the Word Faith people say it does.

Biblical scholar Kirk MacGregor, whom Kathy and I have met several years ago, makes this observation about the Word Faith error:

Echete pistin theou is not a subjective genitive but an objective genitive, thereby depicting God as the object of faith and necessitating the translation, “have faith in God.” Less frequent but equally incisive is the observation that even if echete pistin theou were a subjective genitive, the lack of a definite article before pistin would connote “faithfulness” not “faith” thus precluding the translation “have faith the faith of God” and instead exhorting believers to “have God’s faithfulness.[2]

Now, Christians who have not been deceived by Word Faith heterodoxy, normally concur with the general meaning of this passage and add a qualifier found in 1 John 5:14-15 which reads in part: “if we ask anything according to His will, He hears us…and we have what we have asked of Him.”

So, if Word Faith adherents are misinterpreting what Jesus is saying here then, then the question becomes, “What is He saying?” Our first clue is found in verse 23. Jesus does not say, “if anyone says to a mountain” but, “whosoever says to this mountain (Greek – to orei touto) literally “to the mountain – this one.”

Again, I don’t want to get too technical but Mark uses both the definite article to and the demonstrative pronoun touto. Either of these alone with olrei would indicate a specific mountain.

So, because Mark combines the definitive article with the demonstrative pronoun, there is no doubt that one particular mountain is in view.

Now context is king, amen? Where is Jesus when He speaks these words? Where was He going when He cursed the fig tree? To the Temple. Where was He coming from when the disciples observed the withered tree that occasioned Jesus’s response that we are now examining?

He and they were going to and coming from the Temple.

Thus, Jesus speaking of this mountain being cast into the sea immediately after His act of judgement in the Temple, can only refer to Judaism represented by the Temple Mount, or “this mountain.”

Robert H. Gundry, in his commentary on this passage points out that this statement represents a curse analogous in meaning to Jesus’ curse on the fig tree:

Being lifted up and thrown into the sea makes the mountain moving a destructive act. It’s destructiveness make the speaking to the mountain a curse, as much a curse as Jesus’s speaking to the fig tree that no one should ever again eat fruit from it.

However, the passive verb arthetai (be lifted up) and blethetai (be thrown) indicate that the denouncer lacks the power to personally carry out the curse but is invoking someone else to execute it.[3]

As Gundry reveals, this fact explains Jesus’s faith directive:

Because of the command to have faith in God, the passive voice in ‘be lifted up and be thrown into the sea’ means, ‘May God lift you up and throw you into the sea’…The element of faith comes into this mountain-cursing because in themselves the disciples…the lack of power to speak a mountain into the sea.[4]

So let me summarize. This passage has nothing whatsoever to do with blessings for those that speak these words but this is instead a cursing of external, hypocritical, apostate belief systems, which describes Judaism then and Word Faith today when they push such nonsense.

Therefore, the point of Jesus’ action was to enact a symbolic destruction of the Temple and a judgement upon Israel. That’s why Jesus quoted Jeremiah 7-8 which was a condemnation of the corruption with Judaism and Jewish society as a whole, and that fact necessitated the destruction of the Temple.

Jesus’s statement about the Temple being a “den of robbers” doesn’t mean “the place where robbery occurs” but instead according to the Jeremiah passage, the Temple had become a “robbers lair where they return for safe haven after committing acts of robbery in the outside world.”

Mark’s Greek word for “robbers” (lestes) and its Hebrew cognate parisim from Jeremiah refer not to “swindlers” but to “brigands” or “bandits.”

Now, note verse 24: “all things for which you pray and ask” or pray and plead for, taken in context of Jesus’s judgment upon the Temple and Israel cannot mean pray for blessings upon them or to pray for blessing upon ourselves.

Macgregor again:

Jesus commands his disciples to act in consequence of his pronounced judgement (“For this reason I say to you…”) in the same way that God commanded Jeremiah to act in consequence of his pronounced judgement (“So you…”). Thus we have established that Jesus is recalling Jeremiah 7:16 in such a way that he is expecting his hearers to take the next logical step.

If the faithful cannot pray and plead for the Temple regime, it follows logically that they can only pray and plead against the Temple regime if they are to offer petitions concerning it at all. Just as Jeremiah responded to God’s exhortation not to intercede for the religio-political system of his day by declaring God’s destructive verdict against it, so in its context “to pray and plead for” means “under God’s Kingdom authorization, to pronounce a divine judgement of destruction upon.” Again we emphasize that if Jesus had intended for this to be a general word about prayer or how to pray for blessings, he would have used either proseuchesthe or aitesthe, not both; their unparalleled joint usage strongly indicates that a radically different theme is in play, an inference certified by Jesus’ undisputed outworking of Jeremiah 7-8. Moreover, such fits perfectly with Jesus’ “mountain-uprooting” exhortation to invoke God’s judgement upon the Temple: the fate befalling the Temple will also befall all other systems of religiously legitimated sin.

The phrase “everything which you pray and plead for” means “every unjust system operating in the name of religion which you, as God’s ambassadors, proclaim divine judgment upon” and cannot plausibly be interpreted as “everything you ask for in prayer,” thus precluding the fallacious inference that we will receive whatever we ask with sufficient faith.

Armed with the necessary background, we are now in a position to spell out precisely what Jesus meant in Mark 11:20-25 by his carefully crafted synthesis of word and deed as well as the passage’s contemporary significance. Following his symbolic destruction of the Temple and Peter’s observation that the fig tree he “had cursed” (kateraso) had withered, Jesus was poised to explain his acted parable to his disciples. When faced with exploitative systems claiming religious support that oppress and persecute God’s people and deceive those whom God desires to save, his followers must have faith in their all-just and all-powerful God to vindicate them by overthrowing these systems. God’s justice, as corroborated by Jesus’ actions, ensures a divine verdict of condemnation against these systems, and God’s power guarantees that the verdict will be fully executed at the Day of Yahweh if not before. Knowing the mind and power of God on this score, Jesus therefore gives his followers the right to pronounce a sentence of divine judgement against both the Temple (the mountain – this one) and all other prima facie religious but de facto worldly institutions (everything which you pray and plead for).

In conclusion, far from promising that a person can possess whatever they pray for with sufficient faith, Mark 11:20-25 encourages believers to exhibit sufficient faith in God to stand up against religiously legitimated sin. Believers should expose such affairs resting secure in Jesus’ promise that, if they resist compromise while maintaining lives of forgiveness, they will be vindicated against the wickedness of the Day of Yahweh. Instead of a stumbling block that incites doubt in biblical authority following unanswered prayer, the message of this text is both plausible in light of and consistent with the broad canonical panorama once understood contextually.[5]

So, the point Jesus is making here in context is that apostate Judaism has been judged. Jesus is teaching the disciples that it will be overcome by faith in God as He establishes a new work through His called out ones – the body of Christ. This was the new way, the covenant Jesus instituted at the Last Supper.

Now, that doesn’t mean God is done with Israel. The Bible says otherwise. But, it does mean that salvation is through faith alone in Christ alone. This applies to everyone.

How important is it to accurately divide the Word of God? Our spiritual lives depend on it, friends.

Dr. Mike Spaulding

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[1] Kirk R. MacGregor, Understanding “If Anyone Says to This Mountain…” (Mark 11:20-25) in Its Religio-Historical Context. Journal of the International Society of Apologetics 2.1 (2009): 23-39.

[2] Ibid.

[3] Robert H. Gundry, Mark: A Commentary on His Apology for the Cross (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1993), p. 653. Cited in MacGregor, Understanding “If Anyone Says to This Mountain…” (Mark 11:20-25) in Its Religio-Historical Context.

[4] Ibid.

[5] MacGregor, p. 39.