“Before his crucifixion, Christ commanded his disciples to remain in Jerusalem, in prayer and supplication, until the day of Pentecost, and we read that on that day, the Holy Spirit descended upon the disciples, appearing to them as “cloven tongues of fire”; that “there were dwelling at Jerusalem Jews, devout men, out of every nation under heaven”, and that every man heard the disciples speak in his own language. This shows that the Holy Spirit had descended upon and into them, and that they were speaking from the Spirit and not from the intellect.
Whence came this Spirit and what did this mean? We read that after the resurrection of Jesus he ascended into heaven. His physical body was not permitted to see corruption, but it was taken away. Where did it go? The answer is found in the symbolic story of the Passover Lamb that was all eaten by the children of Israel; in other words, the lamb entered into the body of Israel. This was symbolic of the fact that after the physical body of Christ was taken into heaven, by the fires of spirit it was transmuted to Spirit (God is a consuming fire) and sent into his faithful followers on the day of Pentecost, and they – symbolically – ate all of the body of Christ.
As the kernel of wheat is planted in the ground, so all of the transmuted body of Christ was planted in his disciples (Israel ate all of the Passover Lamb), and since that time, it has been growing, expanding, and developing. Some of our churches have recognized the fact that the children of those who have been begotten from above, are as much the children of God as are their parents; in other words, that the rightful heritage of the church is in the blood, the offspring, which is in itself a truth.
Thus, Christ planted in his people the qualities that he had generated and materialized into his fleshly form; and when they were first planted, they were, so to speak, focalized in the few, enabling them to raise the dead, to heal the sick, and to do the things that Christ had done.
As time went on, however, men lost faith in God, and in the power of his Spirit, and as they lost faith the Spirit was gradually repelled from them. But the fulness of time is now at hand, the fruitage of the Lord’s planting is ripe. The mass of the people in the churches is repelling the Spirit that was in Christ. The Holy Spirit is again being concentrated in the few who will constitute the first ripe fruit of the earth, the 144,000.”
Hiram Butler
The Mark Of God: Understanding Your "I AM Presence" 