To REMAIN, abide, stay put — John's favourite verb and the hinge of 2 John. The letter sets it directly against PROAGO, to 'run ahead': 'everyone who RUNS AHEAD and does not REMAIN in the teaching of the Christ does not have God' (v. 9). ⚠️ The irony is almost certainly deliberate — the opponents evidently presented themselves as ADVANCED, and the letter takes their own vocabulary and turns it: to get out in front of the teaching is not to arrive somewhere better but to leave. The same verb carries the Gospel's 'remain in me' (John 15) and the truth that 'REMAINS in us and will be with us forever' (v. 2). In a letter about who may be received, the verb for staying is the one that decides it. ⚠ John 14 plants it three times — the Father remaining in the Son (v10), the Spirit remaining beside them (v17), Jesus remaining beside them (v25) — and John 15 pays it off ELEVEN times, where it stops describing and starts commanding. John uses the verb forty times, more than any other book in the New Testament. Its noun is monē, the word behind 'many mansions'. → first discussed at 2 John 1:9