Did Steve Jobs Go to Heaven?

“Pride makes us artificial and humility makes us real.” – Thomas Merton

In my personal devotions, I am reading through the Book of Psalms. Last week, I came across this passage that really spoke to me.

“For it is clear that wise men die, and the foolish and the senseless both perish and leave their wealth to others. Their graves are their eternal homes—their dwellings for endless generations—even though their lands were their namesakes. But a man, despite his wealth, cannot endure; he is like the beasts that perish… Do not be afraid when a man grows rich, when the splendor of his house increases. For when he dies, he will carry nothing away; his abundance will not follow him down. Though in his lifetime he blesses his soul—and men praise you when you prosper— he will join the generation of his fathers, who will never see the light of day.” Psalms 49:10-12, 16-19 (BSB)

Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple, seemed to learn this lesson late in his life. “Remembering that I'll be dead soon is the most important tool I've ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life,” the multi-billionaire said. “Because almost everything - all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure - these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important.”

Whether or nor Jobs repented of his sins and trusted Jesus as his Savior before his death is unknown. However, his pride may have cost Jobs his life because when he was first diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2003, he refused conventional treatment. Barrie Cassileth of the Sloan Kettering Cancer Center had this to say about Job’s healthcare decision: "Jobs's faith in alternative medicine likely cost him his life... He had the only kind of pancreatic cancer that is treatable and curable... He essentially committed suicide."

Meanwhile, here is what Charles Haddon Spurgeon had to say on the subject of pride…

“O believer, learn to reject pride, seeing that you have no ground for it. Whatever you are, you have nothing to make you proud. The more you have, the more you are in debt to God; and you should not be proud of that which renders you a debtor. Consider your origin; look back to what you were. Consider what you would have been but for divine grace. Look upon yourself as you are now. Does not your conscience reproach you? Do not your thousand wanderings stand before you and tell you that you are unworthy to be called His son? And if He has made you anything, are you not taught thereby that it is grace that has made you to differ?”

“Great believer, you would have been a great sinner if God had not made you to differ. O you who are valiant for truth, you would have been as valiant for error if grace had not laid hold upon you. Therefore, do not be proud, though you have a large influence—a wide domain of grace, for once you did not have a single thing to call your own except your sin and misery. Oh, strange infatuation that you, who has borrowed everything, should think of exalting yourself—a poor, dependent pensioner upon the bounty of your Savior, one who has a life that dies without fresh streams of life from Jesus, and yet is proud! Fie on you, O silly heart!”

(For you non-Englishmen, “fie” means to express disgust or disapproval.)

“Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall.” Proverbs 16:18 (BSB)

- Rev. Dale M. Glading, President