Ephesians 5:8

ἦτε γάρ ποτε σκότος : for ye were once darkness. A consideration in support of the previous exhortation, viz., the consideration that with them the condition in which such sins could be indulged was wholly past and gone. The ἦτε is put emphatically first to throw stress on the fact that all that is now behind them, and surely not a condition to which they could revert. No μέν requires to be supplied here. Its omission in this clause, while the next has δέ, is nothing strange or irregular, the μέν being inserted only “when the first clause is intended to stand in connection with and prepare the reader for the opposition to the second” (Ell.). See Ell. on Galatians 2:15; Jelf, Greek Gram., p 765; Donaldson, Greek Gram., pp. 575 578. It has to be remembered also that the correlation of those two particles has by no means the position in NT Greek which it has in classical Greek. In point of fact it has little or no place in the Catholic Epistles except 1 Pet. (to some extent), or in 2 Thess., 1 Tim., Tit., Philem., and the Apoc., and is comparatively rare even in the Gospels; cf. Blass, Gram. of N. T. Greek, pp. 266, 267. The abstract σκότος, instead of ἐσκοτισμένοι or similar concrete form, adds greatly to the force of the representation. They were darkness itself, persons “in whom darkness becomes visible and holds sway” (Thay.-Grimm), so utterly sunk in ignorance of Divine things, so wholly lost in the evils accompanying such ignorance. νῦν δὲ φῶς Κυρίῳ : but now ye are light in the Lord. Instead of what they once were they had become enlightened by the Gospel, discerners of Divine truth and subjects of the new life which it opens to men. The completeness of the change is indicated again by the use of the abstract term so possessed and penetrated were they by that truth that they could be described not simply as enlightened but as themselves now light. And this “in the Lord,” for it was in virtue of their fellowship with Christ that this new apprehension of things came to them, transforming their lives. ὡς τέκνα φωτός περιπατεῖτε : walk as children of light. The strong abstracts σκότος, φῶς, come in fitly before the exhortation and make it more pointed. The omission of οὖν or any similar particle adds further to the force of the exhortation. If these Ephesians were now “light in the Lord,” it was not for themselves only but for others. They were called to live a life beseeming those to whom Christian enlightenment and purity had become their proper nature; cf. Luke 16:8; John 12:36; 1 Thessalonians 5:5. Nothing is to be made of the absence of the article here in contrast with τοῦ φωτὸς of Ephesians 5:2, the general practice being to insert or omit the article in the case of the governed noun according as the governing noun has it or wants it (Rose's Middleton, On the Greek Article, iii., 3, 7, p. 49).