Please clean your spectacles, and readjust them carefully, and if you are afflicted with the small-print Bible that seems in such common use, get a reading-glass and look here at the proper translation.  That crutching, leather-bound translation is grossly inaccurate, if it is in such big print, and in such wide circulation.  Look here.  Can you see the words?  This is the only correct reading:  “Of His fullness have all we received.”  Put that into the print of your life, for your own sake and for the crowd’s sake, yes, and for God’s sake, too, that the crowd may know the kind of a God God is.

And as if John had a suspicion about possible bad translations, he did a bit of underscoring.  That word fullness is underscored in John’s original copy.  It’s a heavy underscoring, in red.  The underscoring is in three words he adds:  “Grace for grace.”  That is, grace in place of grace.  It’s a sort of picture.  Some grace has been received.  And it is so wondrous that nothing seems so good.  And the man is singing as he goes about his work.

Then comes a sudden soft inrushing of a flood of grace so great that it seems to displace all that was there.  Oh! the man didn’t know there was such grace as this.  It seems as if he had never known grace before.  And the work-song is hushed into a great stillness, though the wondrous rhythm of peace is greater than before.

And then before he quite knows how it happens in comes another soft subtle inrushing flood-tide of grace that seems to displace all again.  Some temptation comes, some sore need, some tight corner.  You look to Him; lean on Him; risk all on His response.  He responds; and in comes the fresh inrush.

And then this sort of thing becomes a habit, God’s habit of responding to your need, need of every sort.  It becomes the commonplace, the blessed commonplace that can never be common.  That’s John’s underscoring of the word “fullness.”  May the crowds whose elbows we jostle get this underscored translation, bound in shoe-leather, your shoe-leather.

Then in his eagerness to make us understand the thing really, John makes a contrast.  “The law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.”  The law was a thing, given, through a man.  Grace and truth was a man coming, the very embodiment in Himself of what the two words stand for.

The law, the old Mosaic law, was not a statement of the full message of God.  That was given much earlier.  It was given to all.  It came directly.  It was given first in Eden, in its flood; and then continuously to every man wherever he was.  It was given within each man’s own heart, and through the unfailing flooding light in nature above and below and all around.  The tide of its coming has never ceased in volume nor in steadiness of flow; and does not cease.  That tide came to flood in Jesus.  And that flood has never known an ebb.