With the passing of Steve Jobs, there has been a lot in the news recently about Apple.  They just appear to be a juggernaut these days.  But one story caught my eye.  It is a story that I had never heard before.  It surrounds the first logo developed for Apple back in 1977 by art designer Rob Janoff.

You have seen the logo many times.  It is the apple with a bite taken out of it and it is multi-colored.  But according to the story in the Apple Museum, Janoff made the logo to symbolize the bite taken out of the apple in the Garden of Eden by Eve.

Call me naïve, but I never put those pieces together.  I never knew that the Apple logo was remotely related to the Biblical story.  But as I explored, the story got darker and a bit twisted.

According to Janoff, he designed the logo with a bite taken out of it in reference to a quantity of computer memory called a “byte.”  That was the obvious play on words.  But he also purposefully made the apple to represent the colors of the rainbow, but they went in the wrong order!    But wait, there’s more.

An Apple executive who was apparently in the know said, “One of the deep mysteries to me is our logo, the symbol of lust and knowledge, bitten into, all crossed with the colors of the rainbow in the wrong order. You couldn’t dream of a more appropriate logo: lust, knowledge, hope, and anarchy.”  A symbol of lust?  An appropriate logo for anarchy?

To me, it is amazing that a designer would purposefully use the darkest episode in human history and make it into a celebration.  The bite taken from the fruit represented rebellion against God and unleashed all kinds of mayhem on people and the earth.  For Christians, the misery of people all over the world, and even death itself is tied to this act.   The Bible even claims that the earth itself is groaning for renewal (Romans 8:22).

I’m not saying that we all should throw away our iPods or iPhones, but it sure makes you wonder.

I remember the Superbowl commercial that came out in 1984 to introduce the Macintosh computer.  By 1987, I would own one!  The commercial featured a play on the Orwellian plot of 1984 where the government controlled the people.  The woman with the hammer destroys the screen and liberates the people.  But wait, if you combine the meaning behind the logo and the famous commercial, perhaps they were saying that they had finally broken free from the “control of God.”  In fact, isn’t that what Satan attempted to convince Eve of?  “For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God” (Genesis 3:4).  He tried to convince Eve that God was purposefully holding something good back from her; that her act of defiance would actually be an act of liberty.

Maybe I’m making too much out of this. But anytime people start quoting the Bible in their art, my ears perk up.

I’ll end with this.  Destruction came as a result of this first sin.  But God was working even in the midst of it.  God would send Jesus to repair the rupture.  The Bible calls Jesus the “second Adam who is a life-giving spirit.”  This will always be even better news that the latest Apple gizmo.