David expresses himself in question form: “How long….Will You forget….will You hide Your face….?” Consider the following two aspects of David’s complaint: “Will You forget me forever?” and “How long will You hide Your face from me?” There are at least two ways to understand these and other statements like them.

True believers may, and do, experience times when they feel as if God has forgotten them. They feel as if the divine no longer takes interest in them. David felt this as well. He expresses this in Psalm 31 in language that may make one wonder about God, however. There we read,

“How long, O LORD? Will You forget me forever? How long will You hide Your face from me?” (Psalm 13:1, NASB)

Does God really “forget” and does God really have a “face”? Is God omniscient or not? Is God invisible or not? How should we understand these statements?

David expresses himself in question form: “How long….Will You forget….will You hide Your face….?” Consider the following two aspects of David’s complaint: “Will You forget me forever?” and “How long will You hide Your face from me?”

There are at least two ways to understand these and other statements like them. One way would be to take “forget” and “face” literally (i.e., properly). This would mean that as we “forget,” so God forgets, and as we have a “face,” so God has a face. If one looked up the words for “forget” and “face” in a lexicon one would find that “forget” means “to forget” and “face” means “face.” So at first read, taking the words to mean what they normally mean, God forgets and God has a face. But does He?

Another way to understand these and other statements like them is to take “forget” and “face” as figures of speech (i.e., improperly). David utilizes and applies creaturely terms to God in order to describe his own experience. Applying creaturely terms to God is done many, many times by Scripture writers (e.g., Psalm 8:6, “…the works of Thy hands…”). The church has wrestled with this scriptural phenomenon over the centuries and derived from that study a method of interpretation that respects the fact the God is Creator and man is creature, that God is omniscient and we are not, that God does not have a literal face but we do.

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