John 17:11-12. Jesus is praying to the Father at the Last Supper. Here He says He is no longer in the world but His disciples are and will be after He goes to the Father. He asks the Father to keep them in His name, which the Father has given Jesus, so that they may be one, even as the Father and the Son are one. Jesus says while He was with them He kept them in the Father's name and guarded them. He lost none He was given "except the son of perdition, that the scripture might be fulfilled."

Jesus is praying for his disciples, knowing that He is about to die. He says "I am praying for them; I am not praying for the world but for those whom thou has given me, for they are thine." So when He refers to the "son of perdition" who was the only one He lost, he obviously is referring to Judas Iscariot, His betrayer. But I like to think of the Bible, and especially the Gospels, as a living Word, as having each word reveal something to us that is timeless and true through all of the iterations of our rise and fall, and telling a story that extends out through the end of time.

This is John's Gospel, and John very much imbibed his words with deeper meaning. Also, John wrote and experienced the visions of Revelation. If we think of Revelation while reading this, we can think of God losing Lucifer, the devil, and of Lucifer being the son of perdition. In fact, if we are going to look for the "one" that God lost, we would have to go back to Lucifer as the primary one, and the source of the loss of all others, even Judas (See John 13:2). That is not to say that Judas, and everyone else who will be lost, did not have free will, but that the source of sin and the effects of the Fall stem directly from the fall of Lucifer.

So while Jesus here is praying not for the world but for his disciples, we can also "fast forward" and picture Him, at some point, like the time described in Revelation, praying not just for His disciples, but for the whole world, for all of creation in the world, for all the people He came to save (that is, everyone), and maybe, just maybe, by then He will be able to say of all the world He has lost none but the son of perdition.

This is the source of the hope we must have for any individual soul for whom we pray. This also gets to my frequent ruminations in this things, such as I described in To Be Continued... (until it's not).