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John 3:34
For he whom God hath sent speaketh the words of God: for God giveth not the Spirit by measureunto him.

John 15:1-5
I am the true vine, and my Father is the husbandman…

Matthew 3:11,14
I indeed baptize you with water unto repentance: but he that cometh after me is mightier than I, whose shoes I am not worthy to bear: he shall baptize you with the Holy Ghost, andwith fire: …

and grace.

Zechariah 4:7
Whoart thou, O great mountain? before Zerubbabelthou shalt become a plain: and he shall bring forth the headstonethereof with shoutings,crying, Grace, grace unto it.

Matthew 13:12
For whosoever hath, to him shall be given, and he shall have more abundance: but whosoever hath not, from him shall be taken away even that he hath.

Romans 5:2,17,20
By whom also we have access by faith into this grace wherein we stand, and rejoice in hope of the glory of God…

we have all received
This indicates the universal offer of grace through Jesus Christ, available to all who believe. The use of "we" includes both Jews and Gentiles, highlighting the inclusivity of the Gospel message. It reflects the early Christian understanding that salvation through Christ is not limited to a specific ethnic or religious group but is extended to all humanity (Galatians 3:28).

grace upon grace
This phrase suggests an ongoing, abundant supply of grace, emphasizing the continuous and overflowing nature of God's favor and blessings through Christ. It can be understood as one grace replacing another, indicating the progressive and cumulative nature of God's work in believers' lives. This concept is echoed in passages likeEphesians 1:7-8, where the richness of God's grace is highlighted. The idea of "grace upon grace" also connects to the Old Testament, where God's covenantal faithfulness and mercy are repeatedly demonstrated to His people.

•John 1:14 says, “The Word became flesh … full of grace and truth,” so the fullness spoken of in verse 16 points to the limitless supply resident in Jesus Himself.

•Colossians 2:9–10 reminds us, “In Christ all the fullness of the Deity dwells bodily, and you have been made complete in Him.” His fullness is not abstract; it is the very life and nature of God present and active.

• Because that fullness is unchanging and inexhaustible (Hebrews 13:8), nothing we face can deplete what is available to us in Him (Ephesians 3:19–20).

• The verb is inclusive: every believer, without exception, is a recipient. John earlier said, “To all who received Him, to those who believed in His name, He gave the right to become children of God” (John 1:12).

• This reception is personal and experiential:

– Justification the moment we believe (Romans 5:1).

– Ongoing sanctifying grace day by day (Titus 2:11–12).

– Future glorification promised (Philippians 3:20–21).

• The gift is not earned; “we have all received” echoesEphesians 2:8–9: “It is the gift of God, not by works.”

• The phrase pictures wave after wave, an unbroken succession. When one expression of grace has met a need, another follows.

•Romans 5:20 declares, “Where sin increased, grace increased all the more,” showing grace not merely sufficient but overflowing.

• Practical layers of grace:

– Saving grace (Acts 15:11).

– Strengthening grace for trials (2 Corinthians 12:9).

– Serving grace empowering ministry (1 Peter 4:10).

– Sustaining grace for daily living (Hebrews 4:16).

• Because this grace is sourced in His fullness, it never runs dry; it only multiplies (James 4:6).

John 1:16 assures believers that the limitless fullness of Christ continually pours out into our lives, so that every one of us receives an unending cascade of grace. Saved by it, strengthened by it, and supplied forever by it, we stand secure in the boundless generosity of our Lord.

Fulness is a technical theological term, meeting us again in this sense in the Epistles to, as here in the Gospel from, the Asiatic Churches. (Comp. especiallyColossians 1:19;Colossians 2:9;Ephesians 1:23;Ephesians 3:19;Ephesians 4:13.) The exposition belongs to the Notes on these passages. Here it means the plenitude of divine attributes, the "glory . . . full of grace and truth." "Of," or better,out of this fulness does each individual receive, and thus the ideal church becomes "his body, the fulness of him that filleth all things in all." . . .

(7)The experience of the Writer.Verse 16. - There can be little doubt that the fifteenth verse is a parenthetical clause, answering to the sixth and seventh verses, and standing to ver. 14 very much in the same kind of relation that vers. 6, 7 do to vers. 1-5. There is a further reason; the verses which follow are clearly not, as Lange suggests, the continuance of the Baptist'sμαρτυρία, but the language of the evangelist, and a detail of his personal experience. The entire context would entirely forbid our taking theαὐτοῦ of ver. 16 as referring to the Baptist. This is still more evident from the true reading ofὅτι in place ofκαὶ. The "because" points back at once to the statements of ver. 14. Hengstenberg and Godet think there is no need to transform the fifteenth verse into a parenthesis, in order, after the recital of John the Baptist's testimony, to proceed to a further experience of the evangelist; translating "and even," Lange makes the whole utterance to be that of the Baptist, which appears to be profoundly inconsistent with the position of the Baptist, either then or subsequently. The grand declaration, that the Logos incarnate was "full of grace and truth," is justified by the author of the prologue, from his conscious experience of the exhaustless plenitude of the manifestation.Because from his fulness we all received. He speaks as from the bosom of a society of persons, who have not been dependent on vision or on individual contact with the historic revelation (comp. ch. 20, "Blessed are they [Jesus said] who have not seen [touched or handled], and yet have believed," but have nevertheless discovered a perennial supply of grace and truth in him). We all, my fellow apostles and a multitude which no man can number, received from this source, as from the Divinity itself, all that we have needed. An effort has been made, from the evangelist's use of the wordpleroma, to father the "prologue" upon one familiar with the Valentinian metaphysic, and thus to postpone its origin to the middle of the second century; but the Valentinianpleroma is the sum total of the Divine emanations of the thirty pairs of aeons, which have been produced from the eternal "bythos," or abyss, one only of which is supposed, on Valentinian principles, to have assumed a phantasmic form in Jesus Christ. Nothing could be less resembling the position of the author of this Gospel, who clearly regards the Logos incarnate as coincident with the fulness of the Godhead, as containing in himself, in complete self-possession, all the energies and beneficence of the Eternal. With the apostle's doctrine of the Logos as identical with God, as the Creator of everything, as the Life, as the Light of men; and, as becoming the Source of all these energies to men in his incarnation, there is no basis for Valentinianism. Though the phraseology of the Gnostics was borrowed in part from the Gospel, and though Valentinus may have fancied himself justified in his misuse of texts; the ideas of the Gospel and the Gnostic were directly contradictory of one another (see Introduction). Long before John used this word, St. Paul had used it in writing to the Ephesiaus and Colossians, as though, even in his day, the word had acquired a distinct theological meaning, and one that had naturally arisen from its etymology and usage in Greek writers. Bishop Lightfoot has shown in his dissertation ('Epistle to Colossians,' 2nd edit., pp. 257-273) that the form of the word demands a passive sense,id quod impletur, and not an active one which some have given to it in certain New Testament passages, as if it had the meaning ofid quod implet. By his examination of numerous passages, he shows that it always has fundamentally the sense ofcompleteness, "the full complement,"the plenitude.Πληρώμα is the passive verbal fromπληροῦν, to make complete. ThusColossians 1:19, "The Father was pleased that all the fulness, the totality, should dwell in him," explained elsewhere in the same Epistle, "all the completeness, the plenitude of the Godhead" (Colossians 2:9). The widespread diffusion of the idea of emanations, the hypostatizing of perfections and attributes, the virtual mythology which was creeping through metaphysical subtleties even into Judaism and Christianity, demanded positive repudiation; and, while the whole Church was united in its recognition of the Divine energy of Christ, it became needful to refer to his Divine-human personality all the fulness of the Godhead bodily. In Ephesians St. Paul speaks, however, of the Church which is his body as identified with him, and as (inEphesians 5:27) a bride made one flesh with her husband, without spot or wrinkle, ideally perfect, as the part of one colossal individuality of which Christ is the Head; or, the one building of which he is the Foundation and the Cornerstone. Hence "the fulness of Christ" (Ephesians 4:13) is that in which every member participates, and "the measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ" is equated with the perfect humanity into which all believers come. Hence inEphesians 3:19 these individuals are completed in him, and are thus as a whole, by the realization of their union to Christ, participators in the fulness of God. So the difficult expression,Ephesians 1:23, becomes explained, a passage in which the Church itself, his body, is said to be "the fulness of him who filleth all in all." The Church is the organ and sphere in which all the Divine graces are poured, and is considered as ever struggling to embody the ideal perfection of him in whom all the fulness of God dwells. Both ideas, those of both the Christological Epistles, are involved in this great assertion of St. John.And grace for grace. It is said the evangelist might have writtenχάρινἐπὶ χάριτι, orἐπὶ χάριν, grace in addition to grace received already; but the use of the prepositionἀντί, implies more, "grace interchanging with grace" (Meyer) - not the grace of the old covenant replaced by the grace of the new dispensation (Chrysostom, Lampe, and many others), for, though there was grace underlying all God's self-revelation, yet in the next verse the contrast between "Law" and "grace" is too striking to be ignored. The grace replaced by grace means that every grace received is a capacity for higher blessedness. Thus Christian humility is the condition of Divine uplifting; the knowledge that leads to love is the condition of that higher gnosis that is born of love. The faith that accepts mercy blossoms into the joy that is unspeakable and full of glory. Reconciliation with God becomes itself transformed into active communion with him; all union to Christ becomes the harbinger of full identification with him, "he in us and we in him." This is the great principle of the Divine kingdom: "To him that hath shall be given."

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