The Israelites seem to have asked for a king from an unthankful caprice and waywardness. To punish them, God gave them a king after their own heart, Saul, the son of Kish, a Benjamite; of whom the text speaks in these terms: "I gave them a king in Mine anger, and took him away in My wrath."
I. Saul, the king whom God gave them, had much to recommend him to minds greedy of the dust of the earth. He was brave, daring, resolute; gifted, too, with strength of body as well as of mind a circumstance which seems to have attracted their admiration. Both his virtues and his faults were such as became an Eastern monarch, and were adapted to secure the fear and submission of his subjects. Pride, haughtiness, obstinacy, reserve, jealousy, caprice, these, in their way, were not unbecoming qualities in the king after whom their imaginations roved. On the other hand, the better parts of his character were of an excellence sufficient to engage the affection of Samuel himself.
II. Why was Saul marked for vengeance from the beginning? Is his character so essentially faulty that it must be thus distinguished for reprobation above all the anointed kings after him? This question leads us to a deeper inspection of his character. Now we know the first duty of every man is the fear of God a reverence for His Word, a love of Him, and a desire to obey Him; and besides, it was peculiarly incumbent on the king of Israel, as God's vicegerent, by virtue of his office, to promote His glory whom his subjects had rejected. Now Saul lacked this one thing. It would appear that he was never under the abiding influence of religion or, in Scripture language, the fear of God however he might be at times moved and softened. Mere natural virtue wears away, when men neglect to deepen it into religious principle. Saul appears in his youth to be unassuming and forbearing; in advanced life he is not only proud and gloomy (as he ever was in a degree), but cruel, resentful, and hardhearted, which he was not in his youth. He began by consulting Samuel as a diviner; this showed the direction of his mind. It steadily persevered in its evil way and he ends by consulting a professed sorceress at Endor. Unbelief and wilfulness are the wretched characteristics of Saul's history an ear deaf to the plainest commands, a heart hardened against the most gracious influences.
J. H. Newman, Parochial and Plain Sermons,vol. iii., p. 29.