"Verily, verily, I say unto you, He that believeth on me, the works that I do shall he do also." We read these words of Christ Jesus in John (14:12). Jesus' final work was his ascension, whereby he left this earthly plane of existence, not by dying, but by outgrowing the belief that man's existence is or ever has been in a material body. When Jesus ascended, his mortal body was no longer visible, because the ascension was the manifestation of Jesus' clear realization of life as spiritual, incorporeal, and eternal.
Contrary to popular belief, the ascension was not just an historical event or something which Jesus experienced because it was outlined for him fatalistically. It was the glorious culmination of spiritual unfoldment. In Matthew (11:5) we find Jesus' survey of his own works which his spiritual-mindedness had enabled him to do: "The blind receive their sight, and the lame walk, the lepers are cleansed, and the deaf hear, the dead are raised up, and the poor have the gospel preached to them."
Afterwards, by rising from the grave and appearing to mortal eyes in the same earthly body he had had before the crucifixion, Jesus proved that death is but another belief of mortal mind. It now remained for this great lover of mankind to show that the experience of death is not necessary. He proved that when human thought becomes sufficiently spiritualized to see that there is spiritual existence, then the sense of material existence, with its bodily pains and pleasures, will be outgrown. The material existence will then be brought to an end, not by death, but by ascension of thought above matter.
