I’m in Southeast Asia this week, training church planters and pastors. I heard about Steve Jobs’ death yesterday in an email from a friend. I was reading it on a MacBook Pro, sitting in a house-church in a foreign city that I had navigated to using my iPhone.
I’ve been using Macs since they were first introduced in 1984, when I was 11 years old. Needless to say, my life has been influenced by Steve Jobs (and so has yours, even if you have a Windows PC and an Android phone). I was sad to hear the news of his death, knowing we wouldn’t have his God-given gifts around anymore.
I was even more sad as I contemplated where he is right now. The Zen simplicity that guided his vision for technology also seemed to prevent him from embracing anything as scandalous and nonsensical as the cross.
Or did it? I was reminded of the sovereignty of God over every human heart by this thoughtful post by Lutheran scholar Paul McCain:
Unlike some of my fellow Lutherans and other fellow Christians, who felt a need at Jobs’ passing to begin making pronouncements about his eternal destiny, I am not rushing to judgment. I can’t help but recall Abraham Lincoln’s quip, “Better to remain silent and be thought a fool, than open your mouth and remove all doubt.” Can we learn from Steve Jobs’ errors and mistakes in life? Of course, and we should. Every bit as much as we must learn from our own. But must we, on the news of his passing, be so quick to condemn him and focus only on his faults and failings? No.
One more thing . . .
Steve Jobs was baptized and instructed in the Christian faith, so we can do a bit more than talk about “common grace,” we can also hope that God, in His own ways, at times and places of His choosing, may have worked in Steve’s life, at the last, a remembrance of the gifts from Christ He had received in His life. Unless you have been with a person in their last days, you have no idea what goes on in a person’s heart and mind in the closing days and moments of life. Let us pray God brought back to Steve the remembrance of what he had been taught as a young man in a Lutheran Church–Missouri Synod confirmation class, taught by my friend Rev. Dr. Martin Taddey, now deceased.
So, let’s leave the judgment to God, and leave the judgmentalism to those who have no hope. We who have hope in Christ know that for all mankind the One who suffered, died and rose again as the victor over our greatest enemies: sin, death and the devil, has called us to be His very own. We hold out hope that, in His mercy, He once more reached into Steve Jobs’ heart and mind at the end. And that is the “one more thing” that would be better than anything Steve ever announced and told us about.
Amen.