Charles Ellicott Commentary 1 Samuel 15:24

"And Saul said unto Samuel, I have sinned; for I have transgressed the commandment of Jehovah, and thy words, because I feared the people, and obeyed their voice." — 1 Samuel 15:24 (ASV)

I have sinned. —The grave condemnation of the prophet appalled the king. The grounds of the Divine rejection evidently sank deep into Saul’s heart. Such a thought as that, in the eyes of the Invisible and Eternal, he ranked with the idolaters and heathen sinners around, was, even for one sunk so low as Saul, terrible.

Because I feared the people. —He, with stammering lips, while deprecating the Divine sentence, still seeks to justify himself; but all that he could allege in excuse only more plainly marked out his unfitness for his high post. He could, after all, only plead that he loved the praise of men more than the approval of his God; that he preferred—as so many of earth’s great ones have since done—the sweets of transient popular applause to the solitary consciousness that he was a faithful servant of the Highest.