If the intercession of Moses so wondrously preserved the being and safety of Israel throughout its marvelous history and destiny, what may we not secure through our Intercessor, who is so much greater than Moses? All that God has lies open to Christ through prayer. All that Christ has lies open to us through prayer.
If we have the two Christs covering the whole realm of goodness, power, purity and glory, in Heaven and on earth—if we have the better Christ with us here in this world—why is it that we sigh to know the Christ after the flesh as the disciples knew Him? Why is it that the mighty work of these two Almighty Intercessors finds us so barren of Heavenly fruit, so feeble in all Christly principles, so low in the Christly life, and so marred in the Christly image? Is it not because our prayers for the Holy Spirit have been so faint and few? The Heavenly Christ can only come to us in full beauty and power when we have received the fullness of the present earthly Christ, even the Holy Spirit.
Living always the life of prayer, breathing always the spirit of prayer, being always in the fact of prayer, praying always in the Holy Spirit, the Heavenly Christ would become ours by a clearer vision, a deeper love, and a more intimate fellowship than He was to His disciples in the days of His flesh.
We would not disguise nor abate the fact that there is a loss to us by our absent Christ as we will see and know Him in Heaven. But in our earthly work to be done by us, and above all to be done in us, we will know Christ and the Father better, and can better utilise them by the ministry of the Holy Spirit than would have been possible under the personal, human presence of the Son. So to the loving and obedient ones who are filled with the Spirit, both the Father and the Son “Will come unto us and make their abode with us.” In the day of the fullness of the indwelling Spirit, “Ye shall know that I am in my Father and ye in me and I in you.” Amazing oneness and harmony, wrought by the almighty power of the other Christ!
There is not a note in the archangel’s song to which the Holy Spirit does not attune man into sympathy, not a pulsation in the heart of God to which the Holy Spirit-filled heart does not respond with loud amens and joyful hallelujahs. Even more than this, by the other Christ, the Holy Ghost, “we know the love of Christ which passeth knowledge.” More than this, by the Holy Spirit we are “filled with all the fullness of God.” More than this, God is able to do exceeding abundantly above all that we ask or think according to the power of the Holy Spirit which worketh in us.
The presence and power of the other Christ would more than compensate the disciples for the loss of the first Christ. His going away had filled their hearts with a strange sorrow. A loneliness and desolation like an orphan’s woe had swept over their hearts and stunned and bewildered them; but He comforted them by telling them that the Holy Ghost would be like the pains of a travailing mother, all forgotten in the untold joy that a man-child was born into the world.
XVI PRAYER AND THE HOLY GHOST DISPENSATION
_How God needs, how the world needs, how the Church needs the flow of the mighty river, more blessed than the Nile, deeper, broader and more overflowing than the Amazon’s mighty current! and yet what mere rills we are! We need, the age needs, the Church needs, memorials of God’s mighty power, which will silence the enemy and the avenger, dumbfound God’s foes, strengthen weak saints, and fill strong ones with triumphant raptures._