And we know that we are of God, and the whole world lieth in wickedness [or, in the wicked one]. (1 JOHN 5:19)

The New Testament teaches that however much the world may change on the surface, it is always under the control of evil and of sin. This admits that the powers of evil can be mollified a great deal, and they have been mollified during the passing of the centuries. There have been periods when the world has been getting better, but these have been followed by a terrible declension, and the teaching of the New Testament is that the whole time the world has been lying “in the wicked one.”
Now that is where, it seems to me, we have been so steadily fooled for the last hundred years; and when I say “we,” I mean the Christian as well as the non-Christian. How confident people were toward the end of the nineteenth century that the world was being Christianized! But we must not be deluded by all these changes that are merely superficial. The world, says John to these people, is under the dominion of Satan and sin. It is in the grip of evil; it always has been, and it always will be.
According to the New Testament (and here we get the realism), the world will always be the world; it will never get better. I do not know the future. There may be another period of apparent reform and improvement, but the world will still be lying “in the wicked one,” and indeed the New Testament tells us it may “wax worse and worse” (2 Timothy 3:13). Indeed the evil of the world is so essentially a part of it and its life that its final outlook will be judgment and destruction. You will find this teaching everywhere. The evil in the world cannot be taken out; it is to be destroyed. There is to be an ultimate climax, and there will be a terrible end.

– Martyn Lloyd-Jones and Robert Backhouse, Walking with God Day by Day: 365 Daily Devotional Selections, (Wheaton, IL: Crossway, 2013).