83 - 1Jn 5:19
Οἴδαμεν ὅτι ἐκ τοῦ Θεοῦ ἐσμὲν, καὶ ὁ κόσμος ὅλος ἐν τῷ πονηρῷ κεῖται·
Whilst we thus know ourselves, as the children of God, to be secure against any contact with the evil one, we know, on the other hand, that the world is perfectly under the power of this evil one. ἘκτοῦΘεοῦ [“from God”] and ἐντῷπονηρῷ [“in the evil one”] are the representatives of the antithesis. It follows from this collocation itself, as also from the analogy with ὁπονηρός [“the evil one”] in the previous verse, that the dative is to be here taken as masculine and not as neuter. Further, we are led to this by the fact that πονηρός [“evil one”] never occurs as a neuter throughout the Epistle. But this certainly makes the κεῖταιἐν [“lies in”] all the more difficult. There is no instance in the New Testament of κεῖταιἐν [“lies in”] being connected with a personal name; but Sophocles, Œdip. Col. 247-248,[N] seems to give an illustration: ἐν ὔμμι γὰρ ὡςθεῷ κείμεθατλάμονες[LSJ] [“foron you, as on a god, we depend in our misery”]. Antigone’s meaning is: In you Athenians we, with all our life and hope and expectation, are perfectly bound up; on you depends not only the specific gift which we would have of you, but we ourselves, with all that we are and have, depend on you. So it is here. The world rests on Satan, its whole being as world is constituted by its relation to him; devil and world are ideas so interpenetrating each other, that the latter comes to its full meaning only through the former. It is obvious that the world is to be understood here, as in 1Jn 2:15, of the world as pervaded with sin. And ὁ κόσμος ὅλος ἐν τῷ πονηρῷ κεῖται [“the whole world lies in the evil one”], which is more pregnant than ὁ κόσμος ὅλος [“the whole world”]: it is not that the whole world is subjected to Satanic influence; the apostle makes it emphatic that the world as a whole, without any qualification or exception, all that is in it absolutely, is under his sway.