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Christmas is about the simple fact that /Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners/ (I Tim.
1:15).
We broke God’s law.
God sent his Son to suffer the full weight of God’s justice in our place and then lead us to heaven.
That’s what has already happened.
The question now is, How should we respond to it?
What does the Christmas message call us to do?
The answer to these questions was given a long time ago.
The wise men said to King Herod: /Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him/ (v.
2).
The Christmas message requires us to humble ourselves before King Jesus and worship him as our only sovereign.
The visit of the wise men presents us with a contrasting picture of how men worship our King.
Herod demonstrates what not to do, and so do the Jewish officials who knew where the Messiah was to be born but did not seek him.
Their worship is at best nothing more than lip-service, and at worst a mask of contempt.
The wise men, on the other hand, show us how to worship Jesus.
The fact that they found him in humble circumstances — living in an ordinary house in a very small town and not in a palace — did not deter them.
They offered him their most precious gifts, believing him to be a King with no equal.
Our purpose this evening will be to examine this contrast so that we might improve our worship of the King this Christmas season.
!
The Worship of Herod the Great
We’ll begin with the man who has come to be known in history as “Herod the Great.”
Herod, although heralded as the king of the Jews, was not really a Jew.
His father was an Idumean (a descendent of Esau) and his mother was a Nabatean (a descendent of Ishmael).
And not only was he not a Jew, he had no interest in the Jewish religion at all.
The only reason he invested a fortune in enlarging the Jewish temple was to secure the favor of the Jews and increase his praise throughout the world.
He was motivated solely by self-interest.
Moreover, Herod was as misanthropic a king as any man has ever been.
He had a reputation for maintaining his power by eliminating anyone who got in his way.
History tells us that he wiped out the entire Hasmonean family, including one of his nine wives, for purely political reasons.
Later, he executed two of his brothers, three of his sons, and the entire Sanhedrin.
And toward the end of his life, when he finally accepted the fact that he was dying, he ordered his soldiers to massacre Jewish officials at the hippodrome before announcing his death.
At least this way, he thought, the Jews would mourn at his death even if they were not mourning for him.
So, compared to his other misdeeds, the murder of perhaps a dozen small children in Bethlehem was a minor footnote to a reign filled with cruelty and terror.
In any case, sometime about 5 BC the wise men came to Herod looking for the newborn King of the Jews.
Herod’s first response, according to verse 3, was to be /troubled/.
The word used here (ἐταράχθη) indicates an extreme agitation of mind, distress, terror, dread and confusion.
To use a phrase familiar in our day, he was at his wit’s end.
He was in a crisis that had no solution.
Having spent forty years protecting his throne, along came a new threat he didn’t even know about and it was announced to him by, of all things, eastern magi.
The eastern realms had already forced him to seek refuge in Rome once before, and here they are again announcing the end of his kingdom.
But our text says it was not just Herod who was troubled.
All Jerusalem was troubled with him.
No reason is given for the city’s turmoil, but considering the fact that Herod believed no sacrifice was too great to maintain his control — not even the executions of his wives, sons and brothers — and that he was disposed to intolerable cruelty, it’s very likely that the people feared a new wave of brutality that the visit of the wise men might unleash.
Their fears, as we know looking back on the story, were more than justified.
Sadly, Herod’s response to the announcement of the new King is exactly what we would have expected from him.
He carefully sought out information that would help him identify the one who threatened his kingdom.
First, he wanted to know where this new King was.
So, he gathered together all the chief priests and scribes of the Jews.
If anyone would know the location of the Messiah’s birthplace, they would.
The chief priests, which included both the high priest as well as the heads of the Levitical families, were the religious leaders of the day.
The scribes were experts in the Old Testament Scriptures.
Herod asked them where Christ would be born, and they identified his birthplace as Bethlehem of Judea.
Their opinion was drawn from several passages of Scripture, the most obvious of which is Micah 5:2, which specifically mentions Bethlehem as the birthplace of the Ruler of the Jews.
However, the last phrase of verse 6 comes from II Samuel 5:2, where the men of Israel sought David to be their king and assured him of God’s favor.
David, whose kingdom foreshadowed the Messiah’s, was also born in Bethlehem.
Isaiah 9:6–7 was probably also in their thinking, since it describes the greatness of the Prince of Peace’s reign: /Of the increase of his government and peace there shall be no end, upon the throne of David, and upon his kingdom, to order it, and to establish it with judgment and with justice from henceforth even for ever/.
Next, Herod wanted to know the new King’s age.
The best way to determine this was to ascertain when the star first appeared that led the wise men to Jerusalem.
So he met with the wise men secretly and asked them when the star appeared.
Matthew did not record their answer, but the fact that Herod killed all the young boys in Bethlehem under two years of age according to what the wise men had told him (v.
16) suggests that the star had appeared no more than two years earlier.
In addition to this, there are at least two other indications in our text that Jesus was no longer an infant when the wise men came to see him.
For one thing, Matthew consistently refers to Jesus not as an infant (βρέφος), but as a /young child/ (παιδίον).
The same word appears in verses 8, 9, 11, 13, 14, 20 and 21.
Further, according to verse 11, the wise men found Jesus in a house, not in a stable.
Enough time had passed for Jesus and his family to settle in a home somewhere near his birthplace.
In a sense, we can say that the visit of the wise men is really a post-Christmas story, but that’s only partly true.
It is also a Christmas story as well.
It shows that Jesus came into the world to reign over a kingdom that contrasted with all the kingdoms of the world — a kingdom characterized by love, peace and joy.
His is a universal kingdom in which he governs all the nations of the world according to the sovereign pleasure.
His is an omnipotent kingdom that even hell itself cannot defeat, even when its king is only two years old.
In our text, hell is represented by the Pharaoh-like King Herod, who like his ancient Egyptian counterpart tried to kill the Jews when they threatened his reign.[1]
Under Herod’s infamous reign, the scepter was departing from Judah (Gen.
49:10), but it returned with even greater glory and power in the kingdom of Jesus Christ.
In fact, the purpose of every word in Matthew’s gospel is to show that Christ is King.
And finally, Herod wanted to know who the new King was.
He sent the wise men to Bethlehem, told them to find the young child and then to let him know so that he might join them in their worship.
But, of course, his kind of “worship” was not exactly what the wise men had in mind.
After the wise men, who had been warned in a dream not to return to Herod, left by another way, Herod massacred all the children in Bethlehem that were under two years of age.
He had pretended to be interested in the Messiah only to suit his own purposes.
Sadly, this is the way worldlings celebrate Christmas, too.
They sing Christmas carols, exchange gifts and Christmas cards while pretending to honor the KIng, but when Christmas is over they either act like Christ never came or they oppose everything that he came for.
The same people who spend tons of money to celebrate Christmas distribute contraceptives in the schools, fight against student-led Bible studies, and make sure that concerned parents do not have access to their minor children’s health records.
By their actions throughout the year, they massacre Christ time and again in their thinking.
And they foolishly believe that they are winning!
Did Herod win?
No way!
The results of his kind of worship are evident in the manner of his death, which is only a faint shadow of the unending misery that he will suffer in hell.
Listen to Josephus’ account of Herod’s sickness that eventually resulted in his demise.
He wrote,
But now Herod’s distemper greatly increased upon him after a severe manner, and this by God’s judgment upon him for his sins: for a fire glowed in him slowly, which did not so much appear to the touch outwardly as it augmented his pains inwardly; for it brought upon him a vehement appetite to eating, which he could not avoid to supply with one sort of food or other.
His entrails were also exulcerated, and the chief violence of his pain lay on his colon; an aqueous and transparent liquor also settled itself about his feet, and a like matter afflicted him at the bottom of his belly.
Nay, farther, his privy member was putrified, and produced worms; and when he sat upright he had a difficulty of breathing, which was very loathsome, on account of the stench of his breath, and the quickness of its returns; he had also convulsions in all parts of his body, which increased his strength to an insufferable degree.
It was said by those who pretended to divine, and who were endowed with wisdom to foretell such things, that God inflicted this punishment on the king on account of his great impiety; yet was he still in hopes of recovering, though his afflictions seemed greater than anyone could bear.[2]
In the end, Herod was unable to protect himself or his kingdom.
His feigned worship of the King of Kings only increased his misery.
!
The Worship of the Eastern Magi
Now let us turn our attention to the wise men, who did not come to see Jesus out of self-interest but because they wanted to worship him in spirit and in truth.
But the visit of the wise men immediately raises a question: who were they?
The KJV calls them /wise men/ because they served as advisers to eastern kings.
However, they were not themselves kings (contrary to the Christmas carol /We Three Kings/).
We do not know how many wise men there were.
The traditional number is three, but this is based mostly on the number of gifts mentioned in verse 11 — the gold, frankincense and myrrh.
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