“Vanity of vanities,” says the Preacher, “Vanity of vanities! All is vanity.” Ecclesiastes 1:2
“My friend and colleague Dr. Harold Dressler has convinced me that the word translated “vanity” is not to be taken to mean that all these things are equally useless, stupid, “vain,” but that all these things are transient. They are “vanity” in the sense that they are non-enduring. Such things, if you will, are cursed with temporality, with transience. When I die, I will take out with me exactly what I brought in–nothing…We must ask ourselves how important contemporary transient values will appear to us in fifty billion trillion millennia. It is a poor bargain which exchanges the eternal for the temporal, regardless of how much tinsel is used to make the temporal more attractive.”
D.A. Carson in The Sermon on the Mount: An Evangelical Exposition of Matthew 5-7 (Grand Rapids: Baker, 1990) 77.