1 Samuel 15:12 Commentary and Bible Study

‘And when Samuel rose early to meet Saul in the morning, it was told Samuel, saying, Saul came to Carmel, and, behold, he set him up a place.’ That means he built an altar. A little earlier in the narrative we read of Saul setting up an altar, a monument, to the Lord. But now ‘to the Lord’ is not mentioned, and it is the people reporting this. Instead of saying, he built and altar, they say, ‘he set him up a place.’ It seems to be rather cynically expressed. They know he was building an altar, but they are losing their trust in Saul already, and so they express it like this: ‘Saul came to Carmel, and set him up a place.’ He built a monument to his victory to glorify himself, and he has gone about, turned round abruptly, and gone down the Gilgal. There is some disappointment, and dismay, and perhaps mistrust in the utterance of the people.Samuel comes to Saul, and Saul says in a brazen way to Samuel, ‘Blessed be thou of the LORD: I have performed the commandment of the LORD.’ Was he lying? No, not altogether, but neither was he being completely honest. He was trying to convince himself and Samuel that he had obeyed the commandment of the Lord, and carried it out well enough, so he says so to Samuel. ‘I have performed [fully carried out] the commandment of the LORD.’ Saul wanted to believe that seventy percent obedience is good enough; it will do; it is grand. Certainly his own conscience was not satisfied with this. Only fifty percent, but as far as he is concerned, he has done it. ‘And Samuel said, What meaneth then this bleating of the sheep in mine ears, and the lowing of the oxen which I hear?’ It was the noise of sin; it was all around: the evidence that he hadn't obeyed the commands. Saul immediately resorts to another evasion: he blames it on the people. ‘They have brought them from the Amalekites’, and then he adds this excuse: ‘for the people spared the best of the sheep and of the oxen, to sacrifice unto the LORD thy God; and the rest we have utterly destroyed.’ This was a half-truth or less in several different ways. They wouldn't have done it without the king's permission. Only some of the animals had been kept for sacrifice; – which Saul had not been instructed to offer – the others had been kept as spoil by the people, and Saul was too weak-minded as a leader to insist the people obey the Lord. He was a man-pleaser. Neither was it true that the rest had been destroyed. They had destroyed only ‘every thing that was vile and refuse’, and that was to be the measure of his obedience: a token destruction, which paid lip service to Samuel’s instruction, but was careful not to do away with anything worth keeping.