15 "(John bore witness about him, and cried out, “This was he of whom I said, ‘He who comes after me ranks before me, because he was before me.’”)16 And from his fullness we have all received, grace upon grace. 17 For the law was given through Moses; grace and truth came through Jesus Christ.18 No one has ever seen God; the only God, who is at the Father's side, he has made him known."
John 1:15-18
The introduction of John the Baptist's witness here, as in 6-8, serves to underline the way in which the apostles came to behold the glory of Christ. God sent him into the darkness of their time to bear witness to the light, and it was John, as we see later, who pointed them to the Lamb of God that taketh away the sin of the world (29). The correct rendering of 16 is 'Because of His fullness...'. The words seem to depend on 14, and refer back both to 'full of grace and truth' and to 'we beheld His glory’. The seeing of His glory consists in, and flows from, receiving His fullness. We see His glory and know Him as full of grace and truth by receiving of His fullness. This is the force of the 'because' with which the verse begins in the Greek. The reference is, moreover, to the experience of conversion, rebirth, receiving Christ (12, 13), for when we receive Him we receive One in Whom all the fullness of the Godhead dwells in bodily form. One cannot but think of the similarity of John's teaching here to that of Paul's in Colossians 1:15-19 and 2:9, 10. Paul's ‘Christ in you, the hope of glory' (Colossians 1:27) exactly corresponds to John's 'As many as received Him’ in 12. The parallel extends also to the manner in which this fullness is imparted: for Paul goes on to say, 'Whom we preach, warning...and teaching...that we may present every man perfect in Christ Jesus' (Colossians 1:28), while John makes reference to the testimony and preaching of John the Baptist. It is in the context of the preaching of the Word, and through that preaching, that a whole Christ, in all His fullness, is mediated to the hearts of men.