According to his sister in her eulogy those were Steve Jobs final words before he died. From what I have read, Jobs, throughout most of his life was not a believer in God or at least one who was convinced that God exists. And if he believed God did exist, he was not sure how much influence God had on this world or, in particular, in his own life. And even if God did exist, Jobs was not a believer in life after death.
As his disease increased, however, he was having second thoughts about eternal life, not so much in what it consisted so much that there is one. Whether or not he finally came to believe in resurrection is not known, or at least it seems he never told anyone that he had come to that belief. However, from his final words it seems and sounds to me that he no longer had any doubts. He saw for certain and his immediate reaction was “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow!”
My suspicion is that those are every person’s words when entering into eternal life and encountering our God. Or as Paul says, quoting the scriptures, “no eye has seen, nor ear heard, nor the human heart conceived, what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Corinthians 2:9). What other response could or would there be when we experience heaven for the first time other than “Oh wow!”?
We believe in heaven, we Christians. We believe that there is life after death, a resurrection to new life, a life given to everyone as God’s loving gift to us. We do not know for certain that heaven exists as no one who has ever died has come back to tell us that it is so. We have heard stories about near-death experiences where those who seem to have died or even been declared dead have awoken and told those present that they had seen dead loved ones or heard the most beautiful music they ever heard as my Uncle Dan said to my mother just before he died.
We want to hear such stories. Perhaps we even need to hear them. Yes, we have Paul’s words to the people of Corinth and we have Jesus’ promise to the thief on the cross next to him that he would be with Jesus in paradise that very day. We do not doubt the truth we find in scripture. But the real truth is that we would like our beliefs confirmed by those we know personally, like my Uncle Dan or even Steve Jobs.
What Steve Jobs had, I believe, was a near-death experience just before he died. He was privileged to catch a glimpse of what life in death was like and all he could say was “Oh wow!”
Whether his experience will convince others about life in death no one knows. Hopefully it will give non-believers and doubters pause. But each of them and each of us have to make and take from that whatever we will.
As we say in the Apostles Creed, we believe in “the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body, and the life everlasting.” What all that entails, what it all looks like, we have no idea. As Paul hints, we can only imagine what that resurrected life will be like; and even in our wildest imaginations, we will come up short. But when that time occurs, our first words will be “Oh wow, oh wow, oh wow!”
