It's as though you're tiptoeing around something that you could say and actively choosing not to say it. Just as Last Crusade gets a lot of dramatic mileage out of what it does alter in its variations on the Raiders formula (Indy succeeds in getting away with the opening artifact, he nearly falls off a cliff when he gets too into his chase scene headbanging, etc.), its final sequence is in certain respects a variant on the Raiders temple sequence, simply more serious in treatment. Heck, even in the SNES Greatest Adventures game, the penultimate Grail Temple level, before the requisite Donovan boss battle, is a direct remake of the first level in the game set in the Temple of the Chacopoyan Warriors, but with larger, and hence more lethal, traps.
Consider what were cited above as the primary threats in Peru. First, some sharp things come out of the wall after being triggered in a mysterious way. That sounds a lot like the Breath of God. Both even are littered with a corpse or more to raise the stakes. Then there's the bottomless pit. Of course, in Crusade it is made longer across so as not to be whippable or literally jumpable, and is moved to the more dramatically compelling final position in the sequence, but it's there too. Then the tiles shooting out the poison darts; surely this is the least perfect correspondence, but even then in both cases we have Indy's near stumble at the end of the sequence. Oh, and remember what was originally supposed to happen when someone stepped on the wrong letter? Right. Tarantulas. We've even got a replay of the massive, tunnel-spanning cobwebs.
Up to this point, the sequence is more or less just playing around with the Raiders traps, successfully replacing, as Montana suggests, tests of prowess with tests of faith. Then the test of judiciousness occurs, and after Donovan is done in by his own attraction to that which glitters (also: he chose the wrong friends, and it cost him), it's Indy's turn. There's no room for trickery on his part; he can't fool the device, whether it's God himself or not, as he'd tried to before. It's not the gold. It's made of wood. And even when choosing wisely, he still can't get it out of the Temple without the temple collapse sequence happening. (Incidentally, the extended universe treats this as a regular occurrence, to the point that Crystal Skull seemed inconceivable without it in the wake of the Atlantis and Babylon adventures, but you know how many times it happens in the original trilogy? Just twice.)
And then he goes off into the sunset.
