Pretty sure God doesn’t move mountains and it’s kinda awesome
This week’s snapshots:
Happy Saturday to a bunch of my favorite nerds :)
“Nerd” is one of those terms that has experienced some re-framing in the past 50 years. Where it was once a derogatory label used by bullies, now it’s a neutral, if not fond, descriptor of possibly the majority of the American population. You can be a nerd for anything - as long as there are numbers involved, anyways. If you have the nerd’s characteristic over abundance of knowledge and investment in a subject without numbers, you’re a geek. I didn’t make up that definition, but I absolutely refuse to adhere to Urban Dictionary’s distinction between the two and call everyone a nerd indiscriminately.
If you can’t tell, I’m on a re-framing kick. It’s in all of my books (both of the ones I read this week!), it’s happening in my conversations, and I’ve been trying to work backwards from the recurring emotion of annoyance/disappointment to figure out why objectively ordinary things are grinding my gears.
Do you use re-framing - if yes, to what end? The end of emotional management, like I’m doing, is pretty common but re-framing is a highly handy tool and I’m applying it perhaps in more places than it has a right to be…
Here’s a big one I’ve been chewing on: Herodium. The link will take you to Wikipedia, which will give you historical context to the fact that King Herod, yes the one who made friends with Pilate over Jesus’ death, decided that he wanted to move a mountain so that his cool fortress would a) look prettier and b) be more defensible. So brick by brick, bucket by bucket, Herod moved a mountain so that his castle would be *chef’s kiss* perfect.
That mountain, it is speculated, was visible from the Mount of Transfiguration and FOR SURE would have been common knowledge. So when Jesus came down and told off his disciples for their lack of faith, he told them, with perhaps all of the savagery of any Gen Z teen, “[T]ruly, I say to you, if you have faith like a grain of mustard seed, you will say to this mountain, ‘Move from here to there,’ and it will move, and nothing will be impossible for you.” [Matthew 17:20 ESV]
Despite CCM’s popularization of the image of a “mountain-moving” God, the only mountains God is known to have moved are the ones he planted at creation, and subsequently, all the ones that arise from magma floating out of the bottom of the sea or tectonic plates smashing together. The instances where Jesus talks about moving mountains were assuredly referring to Herod’s supersized sand castle.
The implications of this one re-frame are phenomenally and completely ignored in the West’s doxology. Permit me to unpack some of it:
The nature of faith is reframed. The previous frame indicated that just a tiny bit of belief made a huge difference to God’s movement in the supernatural - but God’s supernatural effort was absent from the moving mountain. No faith = only man-made differences, and man moved what Wikipedia belyingly calls an “artificial hill.” If a mustard seed of faith empowers man-made differences that can terraform the Earth, what difference might it make if we could invite God’s supernatural effort with a mustard tree of faith?
God doesn’t move the mountain according to Jesus’ saying, the disciples do. Yet he declares all the same that “nothing will be impossible for you.” Does God think of us as mountain-movers? What mountains does he think we should throw into the sea?
I always imagined moving mountains into the sea as a single, revolutionary, one-time event where God bent over like a kid choosing a rock to make a splash with, and chucking it as far out as he could into the water. But if Herod moved his mountain brick by brick, bucket by bucket, then “moving mountains” it’s actually a long, drawn out, daily process of taking one brick or one bucket of dirt at a time and throwing it into the water. Almost just like Holy Spirit’s primary plan to change the world starting with 12 dudes spending all day, everyday with their Rabbi…
I bet you could tell me some more huge problems/questions that result from a re-frame like that. The big one that grinds my gears is the matter of faith and its interaction with the supernatural, because clearly it doesn’t actually take that much faith to make change - just concentrated, consistent effort over time.
Brick by brick.
Bucket by bucket.
What mountains are you moving according to this frame? Tell me about your faith,
—Beth
