Steve Jobs’s medical leave of absence is the top story in today’s newspapers. The Wall Street Journal says his brief and poignant memo raises “uncertainty over his health and the future of the world’s most valuable technology company.” These two questions—Jobs’s health and Apple’s health—are the focus of almost all the coverage today.

But I’m interested in the health of our culture, and what will happen to it when (not if) Steve Jobs departs the stage for the last time.

As remarkable as Steve Jobs is in countless ways—as a designer, an innovator, a (ruthless and demanding) leader—his most singular quality has been his ability to articulate a perfectly secular form of hope. Nothing exemplifies that ability more than Apple’s early logo, which slapped a rainbow on the very archetype of human fallenness and failure—the bitten fruit—and made it a sign of promise and progress.

In the 2000s, when much about the wider world was causing Americans intense anxiety, the one thing that got inarguably better, much better, was our personal technology. In October 2001, with the World Trade Center still smoldering and the Internet financial bubble burst, Apple introduced the iPod. In January 2010, in the depths of the Great Recession, the very month where unemployment breached 10% for the first time in a generation, Apple introduced the iPad.

Politically, militarily, economically, the decade was defined by disappointment after disappointment—and technologically, it was defined by a series of elegantly produced events in which Steve Jobs, commanding more attention and publicity each time, strode on stage with a miracle in his pocket. 

Technological progress is the fruit of countless scientists, inventors, engineers, and firms. But Apple has done one thing almost no one else does: put the fruits of insanely complex engineering into accessible form. Before the rise of Apple, advances in computing technology largely meant a daunting increase in complexity and the length of the manual accompanying the device. The 1990s were the age of Microsoft, when geeks ruled the world . . . because we were the only ones who knew how to get it to work.

Apple made technology safe for cool people—and ordinary people. It made products that worked, beautifully, without fuss and with a great deal of style. They improved markedly, unmistakably, from one generation to the next—not just in a long list of features and ever-spiraling complexity (I’m looking at you, Microsoft Word), but in simplicity. Press the single button on the face of the iPad and, whether you are five or 95, you can begin using it with almost no instruction. It has no manual. No geeks required.

Steve Jobs was the evangelist of this particular kind of progress—and he was the perfect evangelist because he had no competing source of hope. In his celebrated Stanford commencement address (which is itself an elegant, excellent model of the genre), he spoke frankly about his initial cancer diagnosis in 2003. It’s worth pondering what Jobs did, and didn’t, say:

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’s 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’s quite true. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become.

This is the gospel of a secular age. It has the great virtue of being based only on what we can all perceive—it requires neither revelation nor dogma. And it promises nothing it cannot deliver—since all that is promised is the opportunity to live your own unique life, a hope that is manifestly realizable since it is offered by one who has so spectacularly succeeded by following his own “inner voice, heart and intuition.”

Jobs was by no means the first person to articulate this vision of a meaningful life—Socrates, the Buddha, and Emerson come to mind. To be sure, fully embracing this secular gospel requires an austerity of spirit that few have been able to muster, even if it sounds quite fine on the lawn of Stanford University. Upon close inspection, this gospel offers no hope that you cannot generate yourself, and only the comfort of having been true to yourself. In the face of tragedy and evil it is strangely inert. Such a speech would have been hard to take at the funeral of Christina Taylor Greene, nine years old, killed along with five others on a bright Saturday morning in Tucson, Arizona. It is no wonder that Barack Obama, who had to address these deeper forms of grief this past week, turned to a vision which only makes sense if there is more to the world than we can see. Anything less is cold comfort indeed.

But the genius of Steve Jobs has been to persuade us, at least for a little while, that cold comfort is enough. The world—at least the part of the world in our laptop bags and our pockets, the devices that display our unique lives to others and reflect them to ourselves—will get better. This is the sense in which the tired old cliché of “the Apple faithful” and the “cult of the Mac” is true. It is a religion of hope in a hopeless world, hope that your ordinary and mortal life can be elegant and meaningful, even if it will soon be dated, dusty, and discarded like a 2001 iPod.

A friend of mine says that human beings can live for forty days without food, four days without water, and four minutes without air. But we cannot live for four seconds without hope.

It’s true for nations as well.

Jobs’s leave of absence was announced on Martin Luther King, Jr., Day, and in the entire twentieth century there was no one who conveyed more hope—genuine, biblical, and faith-breathed—to our culture than Dr. King. Then came Barack Obama, whose election ratified much of what King had dreamed of and fought for—a hope genuinely, if not completely, fulfilled.

But President Obama must lead in a world of trouble and terror. He has to venture outside the walled garden of technology presided over by a bitten apple (which in the latest design no longer bears a rainbow but simply glows with stainless perfection). On the very day that Steve Jobs introduced the iPad, President Obama had to address the State of the Union, and there was no “magical, revolutionary device” he could offer. In President Obama’s world, our world, the bitter, bitten fruit is all too real.

Steve Jobs’s gospel is, in the end, a set of beautifully polished empty promises. But I look on my secular neighbors, millions of them, like sheep without a shepherd, who no longer believe in anything they cannot see, and I cannot help feeling compassion for them, and something like fear. When, not if, Steve Jobs departs the stage, will there be anyone left who can convince them to hope?

Greg Beale:

The OT storyline appears best to be summarized as: the historical story of God who progressively reestablishes his new creational kingdom out of chaos over a sinful people by his word and Spirit through promise, covenant, and redemption, resulting in worldwide commission to the faithful to extend that new creation rule and resulting in judgment for the unfaithful (defeat and exile), all of which issues into his glory; the NT storyline can be summarized as: Jesus’ life of covenantal obedience, trials, judgmental death for sinners, and especially resurrection by the Spirit has launched the fulfillment of the eschatological already-and-not-yet promised new creation reign, bestowed by grace through faith and resulting in worldwide commission to the faithful to extend this new creation rule and resulting in judgment for the unfaithful, unto God’s glory.

Dan Block:

God was so covenantally committed to the world that he gave his one and only Son that whoever believes in him may have eternal life!

Craig Blomberg:

God is in the process of recreating the universe which has been corrupted by sin and has made it possible for all those and only those who follow Jesus to be a part of the magnificent, eternal community that will result.

Darrell Bock:

Mark Dever:

God has made promises to bring His people to Himself and He is fulfilling them all through Christ.

Kevin DeYoung:

John Frame:

God glorifies himself in the redemption of sinners.

Scott Hafemann:

The Triune God is the beginning, middle, and end of everything, ‘for from him (as Creator) and through him (as Sustainer and Redeemer) and to him (as Judge) are all things’ (Rom 11:36).

David Helm:

Jesus is the promised Savior-King.

Paul House:

The movement in history from creation to new creation through the redemptive work of Father, Son, and Spirit who saves and changes corrupted people and places for his glory and their good.

Gordon Hugenberger:

The message of the Bible in one sentence is that genuine truth, unlike every human philosophy, is far too luxuriant, too enthralling, too personal, too all-encompassing, too sovereign, and too life-changing to be reducible to one sentence (or, as Einstein once put it, the challenge is to ‘make everything as simple as possible, but not simpler’).

Kent Hughes:

God is redeeming his creation by bringing it under the lordship of Jesus Christ.

Andreas Kostenberger:

‘God so loved the world that the gave his one and only Son that whosoever believes in him should not perish but have eternal life’ (John 3:16).

Phil Long:

God, who made us and everything else, loves us and gave himself for us that we might live forever with him as new creatures in a new creation—the news is good!

Sean Lucas:

The message of the Bible is the transforming grace of God displayed preeminently in Jesus Christ.

Ray Ortlund:

The Lover of our souls won’t let the romance die, but is rekindling it forever.

Grant Osborne:

God created mankind in order to love them, but we all rejected his love, so God sent His Son to bear our sins on the cross in order that by believing in His sacrificial atonement, we might have life.

George Robertson:

The Bible is the record of God’s promise of and deliverance through Jesus Christ.

Leland Ryken:

The message of the Bible is twofold: to show how people can be saved from their sins through faith in Christ’s atonement AND how to live all of life as a follower of God.

Tom Schreiner:

God reigns over all things for his glory, but we will only enjoy his saving reign in the new heavens and the new earth if we repent and believe in the gospel of Jesus Christ, who is the crucified and risen Lord and who gave himself on the cross for our salvation.

Mark Seifrid:

Verbum caro factum est.

Jay Sklar:

The first sentence that comes to mind is that of my colleague Michael D. Williams, who describes the Bible’s story about the world as follows: God made it, we broke it, Jesus fixes it!

Erik Thoennes:

Doug Wilson:

Scripture tells us the story of how a Garden is transformed into a Garden City, but only after a dragon had turned that Garden into a howling wilderness, a haunt of owls and jackals, which lasted until an appointed warrior came to slay the dragon, giving up his life in the process, but with his blood effecting the transformation of the wilderness into the Garden City.

Bob Yarbrough:

He—God in Christ—shall reign forever and ever; so today if you hear his voice, do not harden your heart but believing the good news take up your cross and follow Jesus.

“Several million people will decide in the next week or so whether to give birth to the world’s newest nation.

They will cast ballots on whether to declare independence at polling stations sprinkled across the vast, flat plains of Southern Sudan, an East African landscape long riven by chaos.

War and famine have ravaged generations in the south for as long as anyone can remember. Fighting forced more people from their homes than in any other nation on earth. Hope remained elusive.

Yet the vote has given many southerners the rare sense of exhilaration that is borne of new beginnings.

From January 9 to January 15, the black Christians and animists in the autonomous region of Southern Sudan will vote on whether to declare independence from a northern government dominated by Arab Muslims. The two sides fought a war that killed 2 million people from 1983 to 2005, when a peace treaty set the stage for the upcoming vote.

Nearly 4 million have registered to cast ballots. Few doubt the outcome.” Read More

6 ways to pray for Sudan (from His Voice Global Blog)

1. It is a foregone conclusion the South will vote for independence. Please pray that violence would not break out during the next six months. Even with the vote, it will not go into effect until July. Therefore, THE NEXT SIX MONTHS ARE CRITICAL.

2. Pray for the North. Many believers and also many Southern Sudanese live in the North. Pray against any type of persecution. Also, pray for the souls of all the Northern Sudanese. One thing that many people forget is the North. THIS CAN’T HAPPEN! Every man is created in the image of God. Therefore, our burden for the North must be immense.

3. Even in the face of Southern independence it is important to remember the North would be an immediate neighbor of the South. Please pray for working relations that would promote peace.

4. Both the North and the South have big obstacles to overcome internally. It is a viable option for different rebel groups to try and overthrow the government. Please pray this does not happen and that a modern day Somalia does not come to fruition.

5. Pray for a profound work of nation building to happen in the North and the South. It will take a variety of areas of expertise to help in this process. This can be an incredibly exciting time for Sudan and the Sudanese people. Please pray the Lord awakens the hearts of people to invest in the needed areas.

6. Please pray for the marginalized. The orphans, widows, and destitute have the attention of God in a profound way (James 1:27) and should have ours. One of my friends, Adam Thomason, is the founder of Collision Records. He produced a song with Swoope, Jai, Lecrae, Tedashii, and John Piper that helps to bring attention to the brilliant people of Sudan. If you go to iTunes and download the song, 100% of the proceeds will go to build the fourth orphanage. Also, if you are interested, you can give directly to the orphanage here.

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads Wow.

Crunchy numbers

A Boeing 747-400 passenger jet can hold 416 passengers. This blog was viewed about 6,400 times in 2010. That’s about 15 full 747s.

In 2010, there were 118 new posts, growing the total archive of this blog to 143 posts. There were 62 pictures uploaded, taking up a total of 9mb. That’s about 1 pictures per week.

The busiest day of the year was July 19th with 327 views. The most popular post that day was The Hope of the Glory of God.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were facebook.com, twitter.com, wearetheaftermath.com, Google Reader, and yelenapecheny.wordpress.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for survey the wondrous, facebook fail, the aftertaste of abandonment, obedience survey, and aftermath – the aftertaste of abandonment review.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

The Hope of the Glory of God July 2010

Other Blogs July 2010

About July 2010

Obedience and Authenticity September 2010

‘My best friend ever in the world…’ October 2010