1 Kings 8:58 - Ellicott's Commentary On The Whole Bible

That he may incline... — Comparing this verse with the exhortation of 1 Kings 8:61, we find exemplified the faith which pervades all Holy Scripture and underlies the whole idea of covenant with God. It is a faith in the true, though mysterious, co-operation of the “preventing grace” of God, which must be recognised in all adequate conceptions of Him, as the Source of all life and action, physical and spiritual, and of that free responsibility of man which is the ultimate truth of the inner human consciousness. God “inclines the heart” and yet the heart must yield itself. The conviction of this truth naturally grows deeper and plainer, in proportion as man realises better the inner life of the soul as contrasted with the outer life of event and action, and realises accordingly the dominion of God over the soul by His grace, over and above His rule over the visible world by His providence. Hence it comes out especially in the Psalms, the Proverbs, and the Prophetic books. It is instructive, for example, to observe how through the great “psalm of the Law” (Psalms 119) the conviction again and again expresses itself that only by His gift can the heart be enabled to obey it. (See 1 Kings 8:26-27; 1 Kings 8:32-33; 1 Kings 8:36, &c.) In the New Testament, the “covenant of the Spirit,” the truth is brought out in all its fulness; perhaps most vividly in the celebrated paradox of Philippians 2:12-13, “Work out your own salvation... For it is God which worketh in you both to will and to do of His good pleasure.”