As a grandparent, you can love your grandchildren freely and unconditionally and without expectation. You can pray for them and you can speak with them to teach them about your Savior. You can model godly living and godly dying.

It’s probably a reflection of my age and stage of life that I find myself thinking more and more about grandparents and grandparenting. In as much as I can read the future, I’m not particularly close to being one myself, but I’m the kind of person who likes to be prepared—to think about future realities so I can be ready if and when they come. I’m especially interested in knowing how to be a distinctly Christian grandparent. And so, as Aileen and I get into the stage of life where we are probably closer in time to holding grandbabies than our own babies, I find myself looking to the Bible to see what it says about being a grandparent. (Also, I was recently asked to deliver a series of messages on the Christian family and didn’t want to overlook a key component of a strong family!)
Frankly, I haven’t found that it provides much explicit guidance on the matter. The passages on parenting are given to parents, not grandparents. It falls primarily to mom and dad, not grandma and grandpa, to raise the children in the discipline and instruction of the Lord. Grandparents need to be willing to allow parents to be parents, and to be careful not to overrule or criticize their children as they carry out the task of parenting. I understand that grandparents ought to be very willing to take on a secondary and supporting role.
But what does that supporting role look like? Based on what I have found in the Bible, based on what I’ve observed in the lives of Christians, and based on a number of grandparents I’ve spoken to, I believe it’s one of influence—of spiritual influence. Let me offer two ways I believe grandparents can take on a role of spiritual influence in the lives of their grandchildren.
Influence Through Prayer
The first kind of spiritual influence comes through prayer. As elderly folk let go of other responsibilities in life and perhaps lose the ability to be as active as they once were, they gain the opportunity to pray more. Not only that, but they’ve had many years to grow in their knowledge of God and their relationship with him, so we trust they are praying better than ever before, that they are more intimate with God than ever before, that they are in a closer friendship with God than ever before. They ought to know the power of prayer and to believe in its necessity.
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But what if the whole of the prophets were profitable for teaching, for reproof, for correction, and for training in righteousness? What if every verse of the prophets was written for our instruction, that through endurance and through the encouragement of the Scriptures we might have hope? Wait, those questions sound vaguely familiar . . . (see Rom. 15:4; 2 Tim. 3:16).
To unlock the whole of the prophets, we must grasp the pattern of judgment unto restoration. This simple three-word phrase captures the entire prophetic message. In this article, we’ll see how this pattern unlocks the message of Jeremiah, and then how this pattern is fulfilled in Christ and His church.
Judgment Unto Restoration in Jeremiah
Immediately after Jeremiah’s ordination as a prophet (Jer. 1:4–9), the Lord provides him with a summary of his message: “See, I have set you this day over nations and over kingdoms, to pluck up and to break down, to destroy and to overthrow, to build and to plant” (Jer. 1:10). This verse is the thesis statement of the book. Notice how the first four verbs are destructive words and the last two verbs are constructive. Here is the judgment-unto-restoration pattern. And Jeremiah will speak it not only to God’s people but to all the nations.
From this point on, the book of Jeremiah feels like a chaotic jumble of texts, with no clear reason for why one unit follows another. The text flits backward and forward in time, from prayer to vision to story, and often very abruptly (the structure is actually highly purposeful, but not on the surface). However, if you remember the thesis statement from Jeremiah 1:10 and the fact that the prophets are always describing either judgment or restoration, you will never be lost. You need only ask: Am I hearing about judgment or restoration?
For example, we read in Jeremiah 4:6, “Raise a standard toward Zion, flee for safety, stay not, for I bring disaster from the north, and great destruction.” This clearly describes judgment that is coming on Jerusalem (Zion) from a foe in the north. In the vision that follows, we do not need to discern exactly when the events take place to profit from how it expands our understanding of judgment. In Jeremiah 4:19, we see the wild terror and panic of those who are judged: “My heart is beating wildly; I cannot keep silent, for I hear the sound of the trumpet, the alarm of war.” And in Jeremiah 4:23, we see how God reverses the created order when He judges His people: “I looked on the earth, and behold, it was without form and void; and to the heavens, and they had no light.” Most crucial is the reason for God’s white-hot wrath, which is Israel’s sin: “Your [wicked] ways and your deeds have brought this upon you” (Jer. 4:18).
Some units, such as Jeremiah 4:5–6:30, are sustained expositions of judgment. Other units, including Jeremiah 31:1–9, dwell exclusively on restoration. Reading these sustained expositions of judgment or restoration reminds one of a collage. In a collage, many individual pictures are laid next to one another to form a whole, often without smooth transitions between the pictures. Instead, the pictures are simply laid next to one another.

God subjected everything “under the sun” to futility in hope. Hope is the opposite of depression. God made everything vapor under the sun in hope that you’d start looking for what is not under the sun. God is not under the sun and apart from Him, you can’t eat or enjoy anything (2:25). So, stop being apart from Him. Please God, by not living just for what’s under the sun. Get wisdom and knowledge and joy (2:26), and a life that’s not a vapor, not just wind chasing. Everything under the sun is in bondage to futility. So, what’s the use? The use of putting everything under the sun in bondage to futility was so that you would look higher than the sun and have the freedom of the glory of the children of God, through Jesus Christ. Ecclesiastes’ use is to take our depressed stare off things under the sun and set it on things above.

Twenty years ago, I was depressed. I was 37 years old living in a nice home in Kentucky. Just a couple of months earlier I thought I was set up for the life I had been working so hard for. I was driven. After three years of 17 hour days of an MDiv program with Greek and Hebrew flashcards, after a missionary stint in Ethiopia, I bull-dozed my way through a Ph.D. program, while working – walking outside in 30 below degree weather in Chicago, hunched over in my car, writing academic papers at 3 am. I had arrived, finally, I thought, where everything would pay off: church, academics, success. It all turned to nothing. So, I sat in the recliner, staring out the window, staring at nothing, with the tv on but not really watching, a freezer full of ice cream which I didn’t eat because I just didn’t care and thought, ‘what’s the use?’. There’s good news for depressed people in Ecclesiastes: you’re right. What is the use?
First, the facts. What are the facts, you depressed people? The “preacher” tells us. He’s the philosopher king, the wise man and he’s going to tell us the facts.
The facts are “vanity of vanities.” The word literally means “vapor,” like a puff of wind, like that mist that comes from vaping. You see it for a few seconds and it dissipates. Everything “under the sun” is like that. Except, it gets worse. It’s not just vapor, it’s the vapor of vapor. If vapor could produce a vapor — if the whole universe were vapor and in that vapor universe there was its own vapor — that’s what everything is like, under the sun.
Under the Sun
“Under the sun” is the qualifier, specifying what exactly is vapor. Not everything but everything “under the sun.” What is “under the sun” is the world we can see; what can be observed; the horizons of this world; the things we see and touch and taste; the work we can do, the things we can achieve with our bodies or minds. That’s the stuff that’s vanity, vapor, meaningless, for nothing. Of course, for most people, that’s their whole lives. They live constantly for what is “under the sun” and so, for them everything is meaningless and they don’t know it and if they find out, without God’s word, they’re going to be very depressed. They’re going to be staring out the window thinking, ‘What’s the use?’
The fact is, under the sun, you’re getting nowhere. “Sixteen tons and what do you get? Another day older and deeper in debt.” What’s the gain if you work 14 hours a day, 7 days a week, for years, to make a life for you and your family and your family doesn’t care? I know a couple who did that, who grew a successful business; were able to branch out to 2 restaurants, move to a nice house near a golf course and their daughter grows up, goes away and never wants to visit. What did they gain by all their toil? (1:3.) “Gain” means profit, end up with more than you began with. Your work has gained you this that you can point to: a house, a bank account, a car. “Under the sun,” people think they’ve gained if they end up with more money and stuff than they started with, than they were raised with. “He who dies with the most toys wins,” they think — except they don’t really think or they’d see that here, under the sun, no one gains because everyone ends up with exactly what they came with: nothing. Hearses don’t pull U-Hauls, no trailers full of their stuff going to heaven. We all end as empty-handed as we started. So, what’s the use?
The fact is we’re never satisfied. “The eye is not satisfied with seeing nor the ear filled with hearing” (1:8.) You never watch a movie that is so good, you’re satisfied never to see another movie again. You never hear a song so fulfilling that you’re happy to never hear another song again. It’s addiction. Now with our phones we can feed that addiction. We can be constantly staring down, looking at something, listening to something and we never have enough of it and we never learn that we’ll never have enough.
The fact is that we’re not really getting anywhere, under the sun. “What has been is what will be and what has been done is what will be done” (1:9). The more things change, the more they stay the same. Is there anything that is really new (1:10)? ‘Ah, we might say back, living in an age of rapid innovation, the iPhone is new, the internet is new.’ Maybe, but what we do with it is the same. Nonsense, looking at cat videos, ranting about politics, porn. Archaeologists dig up pornographic sculptures from Pompeii or from the Canaanites and with our smart phones we’re conveying the same content. Same song, different verse.
Maybe, we’ll think, we’ll make a difference. We’ll write a book or an article or a song or build a building or give the money or be the parent who will be remembered. But how many people do you know from the past? Do you know your great grand-parents? How many of your eight great-grandparents can you name? What makes you think your great-grandchildren will know you? I don’t mean to depress you. Those are just the facts.
Wind Chasing
The facts are that everything, under the sun, is nothing; that it’s going nowhere and try as hard as you can, you won’t change that. You’ll be forgotten just like you forgot your ancestors. You might think that’s brutal, but those are the facts. What I can do, though, is understand it.
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