Sermon Tone Analysis

Overall tone of the sermon

This automated analysis scores the text on the likely presence of emotional, language, and social tones. There are no right or wrong scores; this is just an indication of tones readers or listeners may pick up from the text.
A score of 0.5 or higher indicates the tone is likely present.
Emotion Tone
Anger
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Disgust
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Fear
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Joy
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Sadness
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Language Tone
Analytical
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Confident
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Tentative
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Social Tone
Openness
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Conscientiousness
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Extraversion
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Agreeableness
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Emotional Range
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Tone of specific sentences

Tones
Emotion
Anger
Disgust
Fear
Joy
Sadness
Language
Analytical
Confident
Tentative
Social Tendencies
Openness
Conscientiousness
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Emotional Range
Anger
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Story
Begins back in 1 Samuel 4
Israel was in a state of rebellion and unbelief.
We have come through the time of the Judges when there was terrible wickedness.
Now we have Eli the priest, the religious leader of Israel who had wicked sons
God promised through the little boy Samuel, that he and his household would be judged for their wickedness
Israel was in constant conflict with their close neighbors, the Philistines.
says that Israelites went out to fight the Philistines and camped at Ebenezer.
We read later that this was not a town, but a memorial that Samuel set up between Mizpah and Shen
And the Philistines were attacking from the direction of Aphek
The Israelites were beaten badly.
Lost 4000 men
They asked, “Why has the LORD defeated us today?”
They did NOT ask, “LORD, why have you defeated us.”
So because they did not ask the LORD, they devised their own strategy for victory
They said, “hey, let’s go get the Ark of the Covenant from Shilo and bring it into battle with us.
Then God will be with us and will defeat our enemies”
Eli’s two sons brought the Ark to the camp
This didn’t work.
The Philistines heard the noise of celebration and asked what was going on
The report was brought that the Ark of the Covenant had arrived in the Israelite camp.
The Philistines were terrified.
“We are doomed”
These are the gods that struck the Egyptians with all sorts of plagues and destroyed them
We have no option but to take courage and fight like men!
So man up, all you Philistines and fight your hardest because otherwise we will be slaves to the Israeiltes just like they have been to us
Israel was beaten even worse than before: 30,000 men killed
Eli’s sons were killed
But the worst thing was, the Ark was captured
, and Eli was so distraught that he fell backwards off the rock he was sitting on and died.
The Philistines took the ark and put it in the temple of their god, Dagon.
In the morning, the came and found that Dagon had fallen face down in front of the Ark
They set him back up but the next morning, they found that again, Dagon had fallen face down.
This time his head and hands had broken off.
Besides that, The LORD brought sickness and tumors and death upon the Philistines and they began to panic
The leaders got together and devised a plan to build a cart and put the ark on it and send it back “home”
And that’s what happened.
The ark came to the land surrounding Beth Shemesh.
The people welcomed it gladly
But 70 (some manuscripts say 50,070) of them died because they looked into the Ark
The people wept and wailed and said “Who can stand in the presence of this Holy God”
And they called the men from a nearby town, Kiriath Jearim, to come and get it.
Instead of returning it to the place of worship in Shiloh
And it was taken to a house, the home of Abinidab and that’s where it stayed until David became king.
You remember King David, right?
Samuel calls him “a man after God’s own heart”.
David was a man who valued what God valued, wanted what God wanted
After David established Jerusalem as his capital, he wanted to bring the Ark back from the house where it had been sheltered, to Jerusalem and make Jerusalem the center of worship as well
David takes 30,000 chosen men and goes to the house of Abinidab to bring back to ark.
A huge deal!
A huge celebration!
But look what he did:
The Israelites had been well-schooled in the holiness of this Ark.
It was where the very presence of God was to dwell.
The instructions for handling the Ark were clear.
Carried by Levites (not just anybody) on poles made of Acacia wood, covered with gold
it was not to be approached and touched by anyone, except for the High Priest on the Day of Atonement.
David does something that is almost mind-boggling—something impossible to understand for an Israelite
A huge deal!
A huge celebration!
But David puts the Ark on a new cart
Just like the Philistines had done!
Make sure we notice this.
David was acting just like the Philistines.
Possibly he had heard what the Philistines had done years before
And he thought, well it worked out alright for the pagans
And he completely ignored what God commanded about the Ark
We see the result:
As the oxen are walking along, pulling the cart with the Ark on it, disaster strikes
they stumble, the cart lurches, and without thinking, Uzzah puts out his hand to steady the Ark
Quick as a flash, God strikes him dead!
What is David’s response?
David gets mad and throws a bit of a hissy fit
“If God’s going to act like that, how am I ever going to get the Ark of the LORD
God, I thought you wanted us to worship you
But I’m not going to do it if that’s the way you are going to act
So he abandons his mission and puts the Ark in the house of Obed-Edom, the Gittite (a Philistine from Gath)
So here we have 4 people or groups of people who just didn’t seem to get it.
They just didn’t seem to understand what the Ark of the Lord represented.
The Israelite army—including the priest Eli who let the Ark “get away”
The Philistines (you can sort of forgive them since they were pagans)
The people of Beth Shemesh who looked into the Ark
King David
The Philistines (you can sort of forgive them since they were pagans)
They had forgotten that the ark was NOT God.
The ark was the presence of God.
And the presence of God was contingent on the people surrendering their will to Him.
The Israelites seem to have forgotten about the God of Israel.
They had forgotten reverence toward Him—living in fear and awe toward Him
The Israelites seem to have forgotten about the God of Israel.
They had forgotten about loving God with all their hearts
His goodness
His power
His love
His covenant promises that He had made to them
That if their heart was turned toward Him, He would be their God, their shepherd, their king
They had forgotten about walking in submission to Him and following Him
Instead, they seemed to have taken the attitude of the surrounding nations.
Their gods were those of wood and stone and metal.
Their gods could be set up and taken down and carried around on the back of carts
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