Install Bible Quotes

Nothing good was withheld from me, even moral guidance was provided as my uncle read to me nightly out of a King James red-letter edition Bible. “Them’s the Good Lord’s words in red,” he would say reverently. These lessons installed in me a sense of moral propriety and spiritual obligation that I would later misconstrue to my own detriment. The strength of character I gleaned from them would enable me to survive myself and all lesser foes.

In light of his earlier teaching in the temple precincts, especially as seen in the parable of the Vineyard Tenants (see commentary on 12:1–12) and prediction of the temple’s destruction (see commentary on 13:1–2), we should probably assume that Jesus’ reply carries with it an element of threat. When next Caiaphas and his colleagues see Jesus, he will be installed at God’s right hand and will be coming with the clouds of heaven, in judgment upon the temple establishment. The temple “made by human hands” will be destroyed (and this probably means more than only the physical buildings themselves, but refers to the entire establishment) and will be replaced with one of heavenly construction (compare Rev 11:19, which speaks of “God’s sanctuary in heaven”; and Rev 21:22, where God and the Lamb are themselves the temple).

The Romantic dream of an inner transformation that will make moral effort unnecessary is untrue both to the New Testament and to worldwide and millennia-long Christian experience. Romantics may suppose that they have been installed in a hotel where everything they want is brought by room service at the touch of a button, but in fact they inhabit a house with a well-stocked larder from which they must choose ingredients and do their own cooking. The point of virtue, in other words, is the recognition that there is such a thing as building up a habit of taking regular small decisions to be a certain type of person, so that gradually one becomes that type of person indeed.