There are two words which musicians use to indicate the increase or diminution of a tone. The word “crescendo” describes the increase of a tone in strength and volume to the very close. The word “diminuendo” describes the weakening of a note or voice until it ends in a whisper.  

These two words fittingly represent God and the creature, the One always rising to a climax, and the other always dwindling into weakness and failure of itself. One of the beautiful ways of studying the things of God is to select a single truth or attribute of God or His government, and trace it from its first revelation in Scripture or providence through all the Bible, and see how it expands and brightens with ever increasing beauty and strength to the close of revelation. Let us open our Bibles, and sit together at the feet of our dearest Lord, and let Him speak to us concerning this trait of His blessed nature by which He causes all things to reach an ever ascending climax.  

We read in Exodus 19 that when the Lord gave the law “He descended in fire on Mt. Sinai, and His step made the mountain to quake, and the voice of the trumpet sounded long, and waxed louder and louder.” This was the way God saw fit to impress His own people at the revelation of His law. In the days of King David, after the death of Saul, eleven tribes still followed the house of Saul, and David reigned for seven years over the tribe of Judah only. During those seven years there was constant war between the house of Saul and the house of David, but we are told “that David waxed stronger and stronger, and the house of Saul waxed weaker and weaker,” until there came a day when the entire kingdom was given to David. Saul began his reign in the Spirit, but ended in the flesh, which typifies the struggles of human nature to govern in its own strength. David not only began in the Spirit, but waxed stronger and stronger. This represents the sovereignty of Jesus over the soul, which with the persistent believer will grow stronger and stronger, until there comes a day when there is none of self and all of Christ (2 Sam. 3:1).  

Another instance of God’s crescendo is found in the last chapter of Job. The only people who really understand the book of Job are those who have gone through similar experiences. It is pitiful to see how often Job is misrepresented by would-be Bible teachers who have hardly gone inch-deep into experiences similar to his. Those who represent that Job was a hypocrite, or a mere professor of sanctification previous to his great sufferings are those who know but little of the deep things of God, and take Satan’s side on the Job question. God affirms “Job was a perfect man” before his deep sorrow, but in going through his unutterable woes, he died a deeper death to his own theology, character, loving hopes, and fondest affections, and came through into a fellowship with God which very few religious people know anything about.  

We learn that all the while God was leading Job to a Divine climax, both as to inward character and outward blessing. “And the Lord turned the captivity of Job, when he prayed for his friends, also the Lord gave Job twice as much as he had before.” “So the Lord blessed the latter end of Job more than the beginning.” God is no respecter of persons, and He really loves to do great things for those who persistently plead His promises. There are doubtless many souls who anchor their faith to those radiant words in the last chapter of Job, that God would fulfill them again just as literally as for His ancient servant. Does not God really want to make our last days the very best, but can He, consistent with His wisdom, do it, unless we definitely and earnestly, and persistently plead with Him to do it for us?  

One of the most beautiful climaxes in the Bible is found in the third chapter of Proverbs, concerning the spiritual merchant, who opens up a heavenly business with God. “For the merchandise of wisdom is better than the merchandise of silver, and the gain thereof than fine gold. She is more precious than rubies, and all the things thou canst desire are not to be compared unto her.”  

These are extraordinary words, whether considered poetically, philosophically, or spiritually. Silver is beautiful and valuable, but a little lump of pure gold is more beautiful and valuable than a large amount of silver; yet a handful of fine gold is poor in comparison with a genuine ruby; and yet tons of rubies are insignificant to the deep, multiplied, far-reaching and immortal desires of the human heart. Yet only think, that to be filled with the pure, peaceful, radiant wisdom of God is such a treasure that it throws into everlasting shade this marvelous climax of silver, and fine gold, and rubies, and most passionate human desires.  

This is God’s crescendo of blessing; a soul filled with Christ eclipses every treasure, or creation, art or human love. A kindred verse is found in the fourth chapter of Proverbs, “The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.” To be “just,” in the sense of this word, means far more than to be justified from guilt. And yet this upright soul has a path of light opened up to it, which increases in brightness till lost in the brightness of God.  

We have another sample of Divine crescendo in Isaiah 9, where the prophet speaks of the coming empire of Jesus. “Of the increase of His government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to establish it with judgment and justice from henceforth, even for ever.” These words stretch away, not only into the coming millennial age, but into the shining golden ages beyond the general judgment. Notice, it is emphatically “the throne of David,” which was the theocratic throne, established over men in this world. As Hosea tells us, this throne is now in eclipse, but the man Christ Jesus will return to this earth, and restore the theocracy of David, and extend it over the whole earth. He will reign with His glorified saints over the nations for a thousand years, in which His government and peace will be steadily increased. And then beyond the general judgment, Jesus will extend His empire to all the created worlds that float in space, populating them with intelligent beings, and using His blood-washed and Spirit-anointed members of the human race, “as kings and priests,” to rule over the millions and millions of other worlds, thereby extending His government, and deepening and widening the river of His peace, through ages on ages.  

The first faint note of this universal crescendo has hardly yet been sounded. The prophet Ezekiel gives us a beautiful form of this same thought. He is describing his vision of the building of the city of Jerusalem, when the Lord reigns on earth, and says, “There was an enlarging and winding about still upward to the side chambers, for the winding about of the house went still upward round about the house, therefore the breadth of the house was still upward, and so increased from the lowest chamber to the highest by the midst” (Ezek. 41:17). Men build their houses broad on the earth, narrowing toward the sky. But here is a structure ever widening as it ascends.  

Truly God’s thoughts are not as men’s thoughts. When we turn to the New Testament this characteristic of the Divine mind shines out on nearly every page. Have we not often been struck with those words at the wedding in Cana, “Every man at the beginning doth set forth good wine, and when men have well drunk then that which is worse, but thou has kept the good wine until now” (John 2:10)? Not a few men, not even most men, but note the words, “every man at the beginning” does his best and invariably ends in that which is worse. Such is human nature through and through. But God is just the opposite; He begins with small things, in weak, unobtrusive ways, by giving the pains of repentance, and the suffering cross, but the wine He pours out grows sweeter and sweeter, until it terminates in an ocean of intoxicating joy.  

The great saint, whose magnitude we fail to measure because of his proximity to the dazzling Sun of Righteousness—John the Baptist— understood both poles of this Heavenly sphere of truth, and not only apprehended the crescendo of God, but the diminuendo of self as well when he said, “Christ must increase, but I must decrease” (John 3:30). Oh, the blessedness of that decrease, and the glory of that increase!  

What is it but the crescendo of the work of Christ, which He reveals when He said, “He that believeth on Me shall do the works that I do, and greater works than these shall he do, because I go to my Father” (John 14:12).  

The Apostle Paul expresses over and over again the Divine climax in such passages as, “Though our outward man perish, yet the inward man is renewed day by day”; and the prayer, “That our love may abound yet more and more”; and that peerless petition in Ephesians which begins at a post-sanctification standpoint and climbs up through Alpine altitudes of blessing, until it leaps all boundaries, out into the “exceeding abundantly above all that we can ask or think.”  

There is a profound meaning in one line in Col. 2:12, where Paul speaks of each believer “being joined to Christ his head, by joints and bands, having nourishment ministered to him, and being knit together, increaseth with the increase of God.” What can that word mean, “The increase of God”? It cannot mean that the eternal and infinite God can grow in Himself, because then He would not be the infinite God. The true meaning is evidently that God is everlastingly at work through ages on ages on an ascending scale, and that all His plans in the kingdom of nature, the Kingdom of grace, and the Kingdom of Glory, whether He works in an individual soul, or a race of beings, or a stellar system, is according to a fixed plan of everlasting increase.  

Hence these key words of the Holy Ghost, “grace for grace,” “from faith to faith,” “from glory to glory,” “shining more and more,” until individual souls, and numberless races of beings, and orders of subjects, are being brought through various processes of grace or glory, into ineffable union with the three Persons of the Godhead, that all creatures may be the vehicles of God, and thus God be all in all.  

The biographer of John Fletcher makes a remarkable statement concerning that saintly man. He says that most all good men, even holy men, have a decadence of Divine fire and zeal in their riper years and after doing a good work for God most of them seem to tone down, and grow conservative in Divine things. They seem to be laid as it were on the shelf, and seem to recline upon what they have been or done.  

But John Fletcher was among the few great men of earth, the light of whose fire never waned. His devotion to God, his zeal for Jesus, his hunger and thirst for the fullness of God, his seraphic love, his Heavenly meditation, his humility and charity for others, constantly increased till the day of his death. He believed in the baptism with the Holy Ghost and most positively had it. He trampled on the notion that the soul gets all possible blessing with entire sanctification. He literally practiced and continuously sought for what others professed to teach, that there is no limit in this life to the infilling of the Divine Trinity into a purified soul. And the result was, he reached an experience in God that perhaps not one in thousands of the sanctified people ever reach in this life, because they do not practically understand God’s crescendo of grace.  

Of the millions in the visible Church, it may be a small majority have actually been born of the Spirit. Of those who have been converted, only a few yield utterly to God for sanctification; and of those who are sanctified only a few go with Job, and Moses, and Paul, and Lopez, and Fletcher, out into that current of seraphic fire, and whose last days are in reality the very best. But such is the will of God Who is forever sounding from the deep tone of His own Word an everlasting crescendo in the ears of His listening people.