If we were asked whose Comforter the Holy Spirit was, the answer would be-Ours. The answer is not so ready when we are asked whose Advocate He is. The Spirit is Christ’s Advocate, not ours. It is Christ’s place He takes, Christ’s cause He pleads, Christ’s name He vindicates, Christ’s Kingdom He administers.-Samuel Chadwick
THE fact that man has two Divine Comforters, Advocates, Helpers, is declarative of the affluence of God’s provisions in the gospel, and also declarative of the settled purpose of God to execute His work of salvation with efficacy and final success. Many-sided are the infirmities and needs of man in his pilgrimage and warfare for Heaven. These two Christs can meet with manifold wisdom.
The affluence of God’s provision of two Intercessors in executing the plan of salvation finds its counterpart in the prayer promise in its unlimited nature, comprehending all things, great and small. “All things whatsoever ye ask in prayer, believing, ye shall receive.” All things we have in Christ, all things we have in the Holy Spirit, and all things we have in prayer.
How much is ours in God’s plan and purposes we have in these two Christs, the one ascended to Heaven and enthroned, there to intercede for our benefit, the other Christ, His Representative, and better Substitute, on earth, to work in us and make intercessions for us!
The first Christ was a person. The other Christ, a person, but not clothed in physical form nor subject to human limitations as the first Christ necessarily was. Transient and local was the first Christ. The other Christ not limited to locality, not transient, but abiding; not dealing with the sensible, the material, the fleshly, but entering personally into the mysterious and imperial domain of the spirit, to emancipate and transform into more than Eden beauty that waste and dark realm. The first Christ left His novitiates that they might enter into higher regions of spiritual knowledge. The man Christ withdrew that the Spirit Christ might train and school into the deeper mysteries of God; that all the historical and physical might be transmuted into the pure gold of the spiritual. The first Christ brought to us a picture of what we must be. The other Christ mirrored this perfect and fadeless image on our hearts. The first Christ, like David, gathered and furnished the material for the temple. The other Christ out of this material forms God’s glorious temple.
The possibilities of prayer, then, are the possibilities of these two Divine Intercessors. Where are the limitations to results when the Holy Spirit intercedes for us with groanings which cannot be uttered, when He so helps us that our prayers run parallel to the will of God, and we pray for the very things and in the very manner in which we ought to pray, schooled in and pressed to these prayers by the urgency of the Holy Spirit! How measureless are the possibilities of prayer when we are filled with all the fullness of God; when we stand “perfect and complete in all the will of God”?
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.
