What Do Mountains Symbolize in the Bible? Where God Meets His People

In the Bible, mountains are above all the places where God shows himself and speaks. So they stand for his presence, his strength and his faithfulness. In prophecy a mountain stands for a kingdom, God’s kingdom above all, and Jesus made a mountain the picture of what faith in God can move.

One psalm holds the whole of it in two lines. “I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh from the Lord, which made heaven and earth” (Psalm 121:1–2). We look up at the mountains, and the mountains point past themselves. Augustine put it in seven words: “Through the mountains comes help, but not from the mountains.”

Why does God meet people on mountains in the Bible?

It begins at Horeb, which Exodus calls “the mountain of God” (Exodus 3:1). There God spoke to Moses out of a burning bush and told him, “put off thy shoes from off thy feet, for the place whereon thou standest is holy ground” (Exodus 3:5). He promised that the people Moses would lead out of Egypt would “serve God upon this mountain” (Exodus 3:12), and they did. At Sinai “the Lord descended upon it in fire” and “the whole mount quaked greatly” (Exodus 19:18). Moses went up into the cloud, “was in the mount forty days and forty nights” (Exodus 24:18), and came down with the law. Scripture calls the mountain both Sinai and Horeb: “The Lord our God made a covenant with us in Horeb” (Deuteronomy 5:2).

Centuries later Elijah, running for his life, walked “forty days and forty nights unto Horeb the mount of God” (1 Kings 19:8). God passed by him there. A wind broke the rocks, then an earthquake shook the mountain, then came a fire, “but the Lord was not in the fire: and after the fire a still small voice” (1 Kings 19:12). On the mountain where God had spoken in thunder to a whole people, he spoke quietly to one frightened man.

Then, in the Gospels, Jesus took Peter, James and John “up into an high mountain apart,” and there “his face did shine as the sun” (Matthew 17:1–2). Moses and Elijah, the two men who had met God on Horeb, appeared and talked with him, and a voice spoke out of a bright cloud: “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well pleased; hear ye him” (Matthew 17:5). Peter never forgot it; his second letter remembers the day “we were with him in the holy mount” (2 Peter 1:18).

Scripture gives no single reason why mountains. A summit is high, hard to reach and set apart from the camp below, and Israel’s neighbours could think of a god as belonging to the heights. When the king of Syria lost a battle in the hills, his officers told him, “Their gods are gods of the hills; therefore they were stronger than we” (1 Kings 20:23). God answered through a prophet that because the Syrians said, “The Lord is God of the hills, but he is not God of the valleys,” he would give Israel the victory on the plain as well (1 Kings 20:28). He meets us on the heights, and he is just as much God of the valley.

Christians have long read the climb itself as a picture of the soul drawing near to God. Exodus says that “Moses drew near unto the thick darkness where God was” (Exodus 20:21). In his Life of Moses, Gregory of Nyssa took that darkness to mean that God is greater than anything the mind can hold, so that the highest knowledge of him is “the seeing that consists in not seeing.”

Which mountains are named in the Bible?

Here are the best-known, in the order their stories come.

Moriah joins two stories a thousand years apart. Genesis sends Abraham to “the land of Moriah” and “one of the mountains which I will tell thee of” (Genesis 22:2). The only other verse with the name says that Solomon built the house of the Lord “at Jerusalem in mount Moriah” (2 Chronicles 3:1). Abraham named the place Jehovahjireh, “as it is said to this day, In the mount of the Lord it shall be seen” (Genesis 22:14).

Which mountain was the Transfiguration on?

The Gospels do not say. Matthew and Mark call it “an high mountain apart” (Matthew 17:1; Mark 9:2), and Luke says only that Jesus “went up into a mountain to pray” (Luke 9:28). Since the fourth century, tradition has named Tabor in Galilee. Cyril of Jerusalem, in his Catechetical Lectures, spoke of Moses and Elijah “being present with Him at His Transfiguration on Mount Tabor.” Many later scholars preferred Hermon, because the Transfiguration follows Peter’s confession near Caesarea Philippi (Matthew 16:13), a town close to Hermon. By the time of the International Standard Bible Encyclopedia “the opinion has become general” for Hermon, though the writer of that very entry doubted both and proposed a third mountain in Galilee.

Where was the Sermon on the Mount?

Matthew says only that Jesus “went up into a mountain” to teach (Matthew 5:1), and gives no name. Luke tells of a similar sermon after Jesus “came down with them, and stood in the plain” (Luke 6:17).

Was Calvary a mountain?

The Gospels never call it one. Matthew says they came “unto a place called Golgotha, that is to say, a place of a skull” (Matthew 27:33), and John calls it “a place called the place of a skull” (John 19:17). In the King James Version, Luke gives the same place the name Calvary (Luke 23:33).

How do mountains show God’s strength and faithfulness?

Jerusalem sits among hills, and the psalmists looked at them and saw God. “They that trust in the Lord shall be as mount Zion, which cannot be removed, but abideth for ever. As the mountains are round about Jerusalem, so the Lord is round about his people from henceforth even for ever” (Psalm 125:1–2). Another psalm says, “Thy righteousness is like the great mountains” (Psalm 36:6).

Isaiah turns the picture over. Mountains are the steadiest things anyone can see, and God’s love is steadier still: “For the mountains shall depart, and the hills be removed; but my kindness shall not depart from thee, neither shall the covenant of my peace be removed, saith the Lord that hath mercy on thee” (Isaiah 54:10). Psalm 46 says the same of the worst that could happen: “God is our refuge and strength,” so “will not we fear, though the earth be removed, and though the mountains be carried into the midst of the sea” (Psalm 46:1–2). Even if the mountains go, he does not.

And so back to Psalm 121, the best-loved mountain verse of all. The psalmist looks up at the hills and asks where his help comes from, then answers with the God who made them. Augustine, preaching on Psalm 36, read the “mountains of God” as the apostles and great preachers, who catch the light first, like peaks at sunrise, and pass it down to the valley. But he used Psalm 121 to keep them in their place: “Through the mountains comes help, but not from the mountains.”

Why do mountains stand for kingdoms in Bible prophecy?

Because the prophets used them that way, most plainly in Daniel. King Nebuchadnezzar dreamed of a great statue of gold, silver, brass, iron and clay, and of a stone “cut out without hands” that struck it and broke it. Then “the stone that smote the image became a great mountain, and filled the whole earth” (Daniel 2:34–35). Daniel told him the meaning: the metals were kingdoms, and the stone was the kingdom God would set up, “a kingdom, which shall never be destroyed” (Daniel 2:44).

Isaiah sees God’s mountain raised above every other: “the mountain of the Lord’s house shall be established in the top of the mountains, and shall be exalted above the hills; and all nations shall flow unto it.” The nations come to be taught, “for out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem” (Isaiah 2:2–3). And on that mountain there will be peace: “They shall not hurt nor destroy in all my holy mountain” (Isaiah 11:9). Mountains in prophecy, as the Jamieson-Fausset-Brown commentary puts it in its note on Revelation 17:9, stand for “prominent seats of power.”

The Bible’s last mountain belongs to the same hope. One of the seven angels, John writes, “carried me away in the spirit to a great and high mountain, and shewed me that great city, the holy Jerusalem, descending out of heaven from God” (Revelation 21:10). The mountain is where John stands to see. The city itself comes down from heaven.

What did Jesus mean by faith that moves mountains?

He said it just after he came down from the mountain of the Transfiguration (Matthew 17:9, 14). A father had brought his son to the disciples, “and they could not cure him.” When they asked why, Jesus answered, “Because of your unbelief: for verily I say unto you, If ye have faith as a grain of mustard seed, ye shall say unto this mountain, Remove hence to yonder place; and it shall remove; and nothing shall be impossible unto you” (Matthew 17:16–20). Mark records a similar saying that begins “Have faith in God” (Mark 11:22–23). A mountain is the one thing nobody can move, and a mustard seed is tiny. Jesus sets them side by side and puts the power in God.

The prophets had already used a mountain for an obstacle God would clear away. When Zerubbabel was rebuilding the temple, the word came: “Who art thou, O great mountain? before Zerubbabel thou shalt become a plain” (Zechariah 4:7, 9). Isaiah, announcing that God was coming to his people, said, “every mountain and hill shall be made low: and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough places plain” (Isaiah 40:4).

Paul sets the limit. Faith that moves mountains is worth nothing without love: “though I have all faith, so that I could remove mountains, and have not charity, I am nothing” (1 Corinthians 13:2).

Were mountains ever places of idol worship?

Yes, and the Bible condemns it. Israel was told to destroy the places where the nations “served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree” (Deuteronomy 12:2). In King Rehoboam’s day the people of Judah “built them high places, and images, and groves, on every high hill” (1 Kings 14:21–23), and the northern kingdom “set them up images and groves in every high hill” and “burnt incense in all the high places” (2 Kings 17:10–11). A “high place” was a local shrine, often on a hill. The same heights that could lift the eyes to God could be filled with idols.

The prophets also show mountains shaking when God comes in judgment: “The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt, and the earth is burned at his presence” (Nahum 1:5). Nothing that seems as fixed as a mountain stands against him.

Why did Jesus go up mountains?

To pray, to teach and to be alone with his disciples. Before he chose the twelve, “he went out into a mountain to pray, and continued all night in prayer to God” (Luke 6:12). Before he fed the five thousand, “Jesus went up into a mountain, and there he sat with his disciples” (John 6:3). He taught about the end of the age “as he sat upon the mount of Olives” (Matthew 24:3), and after the Last Supper “they went out into the mount of Olives” (Matthew 26:30), where he prayed in Gethsemane. After his resurrection the eleven went to Galilee, “into a mountain where Jesus had appointed them” (Matthew 28:16), and he was taken up into heaven from “the mount called Olivet” (Acts 1:12).

Yet he also said that worship would no longer belong to one mountain. A Samaritan woman told him, “Our fathers worshipped in this mountain; and ye say, that in Jerusalem is the place where men ought to worship.” Her mountain was Gerizim. Jesus answered, “the hour cometh, when ye shall neither in this mountain, nor yet at Jerusalem, worship the Father,” and “the true worshippers shall worship the Father in spirit and in truth” (John 4:20–23).

The letter to the Hebrews sets the two great mountains side by side. We have “not come unto the mount that might be touched, and that burned with fire,” which was Sinai, “But ye are come unto mount Sion, and unto the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem,” and “to Jesus the mediator of the new covenant” (Hebrews 12:18, 22, 24). Every mountain where God met his people was pointing here. The meeting place is Christ himself.

What are the seven mountains in Revelation 17?

In John’s vision a woman sits on a beast with seven heads, and the angel explains, “The seven heads are seven mountains, on which the woman sitteth. And there are seven kings” (Revelation 17:9–10). Commentators have long seen Rome, the city of seven hills, behind the picture. “The description seems to be drawn from Rome, the seven-hilled city,” says Ellicott’s commentary, adding that the seven kings of the next verse widen the meaning. The Bible has no list of seven holy mountains.

The “seven mountains” taught in some churches today, often called the Seven Mountain Mandate, are something else. Youth With A Mission tells how, in the summer of 1975, its founder Loren Cunningham came to dinner with Bill Bright, founder of Campus Crusade for Christ, carrying a list of seven areas of society that he believed God had just shown him. Before he could bring it out, Bright said, “Loren, you won’t believe what God has just shown me. If we are going to see our nations changed, we have to impact seven different spheres of society.” The mission names them as “family, economics, government, religion, education, media, and celebration,” and its teachers say that once the pattern is seen, it appears “everywhere through Scripture.” Jeff Fountain, who heard Cunningham’s first talk on it that summer, writes that Cunningham was urging “faithful engagement in the various spheres of life,” and that “much later, others took the story further, repackaging it as ‘Seven Mountains’ to be conquered in Jesus’ name.”

Lance Wallnau, one teacher who uses the name, speaks of “seven mountains of culture”: government, media, arts and entertainment, education, business, religion and family. He ties them to Isaiah 2:2 and tells Christians, “we are literally a kingdom-invading force going into all the world,” because “God wants to take territory in these systems.” It is a modern teaching, and its seven areas are not a list found in Scripture.

What does it mean to dream of mountains, according to the Bible?

The Bible gives it no meaning. The best-known mountain in a biblical dream is the one Nebuchadnezzar saw, and its meaning belonged to that one dream. No wise man could explain it, Daniel told the king, “But there is a God in heaven that revealeth secrets,” and he ended, “the great God hath made known to the king what shall come to pass hereafter” (Daniel 2:28, 45). God gave that meaning for one king’s dream. It is not a key to anyone else’s.

Scripture knows the ordinary dream too: “a dream cometh through the multitude of business” (Ecclesiastes 5:3). A mountain in your dream may come from a trip, a picture or a hard week. The same answer holds for other dreams people ask about, such as dreaming about dead animals and dreaming about wolves. Asleep or awake, the hills are still only hills. Our help comes from the Lord, which made heaven and earth.

Related reading

• Where did Noah’s ark land?
• What Zion means in the Bible
• Calvary in the Bible
• Jehovah Jireh: the Lord will provide
• The Ten Commandments in order