Ephesians 5:8 - Coke's Commentary on the Holy Bible

Ye were sometimes darkness,— St. Paul, to express the great darkness in which the Gentiles were, calls them darkness itself. The kingdom of Satan over the Gentile world was a kingdom of darkness. See ch. Ephesians 6:12. And so, on the other hand, we find Jesus is pronounced by Simeon a light to lighten the Gentiles, Luke 2:32. The parenthesis in Ephesians 5:9 serves to give us the literal sense of all that is here required by the Apostle in this allegorical discourse of light. See Colossians 1:12-13