A Letter to Steve Jobs

Good thoughts from MIKE ANDERSON


Dear Steve,
Some of my earliest memories are drawing pictures on a Mac. In fact, as a young boy my dad was a consultant for Apple. You probably didn’t know him, but he was pushing your ideas. I remember taking road trips with him and watching him teach rooms full of people about how Macintosh computers can revolutionize education. Schools all over adopted them.
It revolutionized my education.
I probably would not have had the skills to work on the Resurgence if you hadn’t built the Apple.

Common Grace

God allowed you to build machines that have been used for tremendous good. Through Mars Hill, Acts29, and the Resurgence, God has used Macs to help compile and share gospel-centered theology to literally millions of people around the world. Without the tools you built, I don’t know how the team could have done all that work. God used what you did for good. Here’s a photo of three pastors and three seminary presidents that have preached to and trained millions of people together about Jesus—they are all benefiting from the tool you made:

God gave you a lot of grace to do the amazing things you did in this life.

The Tragedy of Death

Steve, your death is sad to me because I’ve read everything you’ve written and watched as many interviews as I could—this quote really broke my heart:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.— Steve Jobs, Stanford Commencement Speech

Steve, you were wrong. So wrong. 
Death isn’t natural. It wasn’t meant to be that way. Death is the worst thing that happened, not the best. Paul tells us in Romans 6:23 that death is the result of sin.
Death isn’t the end. You’re not “cleared away” as you say. You’re still around—you’re a soul that God created.

Hope

In that same chapter in Romans, Paul tells the people who believed in Christ:

We were buried therefore with him by baptism into death, in order that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life.

For if we have been united with him in a death like his, we shall certainly be united with him in a resurrection like his. We know that our old self was crucified with him in order that the body of sin might be brought to nothing, so that we would no longer be enslaved to sin. - Romans 6:4-6

Steve, I genuinely hope that Jesus grabbed you out of the path you’d been walking down all of these years. I hope that he softened your heart and made you his son.

Faith

God is a good God. I trust him more than anything in the whole world. Steve, I hope that your death will embolden many not to sit on their hands and wait to tell those whom they love and respect about the great and glorious gospel of Jesus.


Sincerely,
Mike Anderson