~ from email ~

Some preachers say that God blesses a person mainly or even solely because this person should bless other people, and because those will in turn bless others, and so on. They often assert this with no biblical evidence, but sometimes they might refer to a verse like Genesis 12:2: “I will make you into a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great, and you will be a blessing.”

This is often applied not only to blessings in general, but also to salvation, so that these preachers would say that God saves you only because he wants you to help save others. The purpose of this teaching is to encourage selflessness, evangelism, and a lifestyle of blessing others. Sometimes the purpose is to defend the moral propriety of desiring blessings from God, because one receives from God only so that he can bring blessings to other people.

The teaching is false, and in fact silly and stupid. If God blesses you only to bless others, and if he blesses these other people only because he wants to bless others still, then it means that God wishes to bless no one at all. If God saves you only because he wants you to help save others by preaching the gospel, and if he wants to save those who would believe your preaching only because he wants them to help save others still, then it means that God wishes to save no one at all. The whole chain of people are only means to an end, but the blessings never attain their end, or the one that they are meant to reach, not even once.

The false doctrine says that God saved me so that I could preach to others, so that they could be saved. And he saves these other people through me so that they could preach to others, so that these others could be saved. But this means that he really wants to save no one, since everyone’s salvation is only the means to another’s salvation, who is also the means to still another’s salvation, and so on forever. Such means have no ends, so that God has no “end” in mind, meaning that he wants to save no one. The whole process makes no sense, because if God wants to save anyone, he can save him directly by the gospel, without going through another person, and without saving anyone that he really does not want to save.

It is self-defeating to adopt such a ridiculous doctrine in order to encourage selflessness and evangelism, or to justify our desire to receive blessings from God. The truth is that God saved me to save me, and then he uses my preaching to save others whom he also wants to save, and so on. All those whom God blesses and saves could be both means and ends, or rather, both ends and means. A Christian should desire blessings from God, so that he himself can benefit from them and also so that he can help others.