I will keep your statutes;
do not utterly forsake me! Psalms 119:8
Forsake?!? Why is he praying about that? God doesn't forsake people. Didn't He promise, 'I will never desert you, nor will I ever forsake you'? But our friend is praying about this. He must be thinking that being forsaken is possible. Is it? Or has the psalmist made a mistake?
No, our friend is quite right in offering up this prayer. God has forsaken some. So, there is King Saul about whom it is written,
Now the Spirit of the Lord departed from Saul, and a harmful spirit from the Lord tormented him. (1 Samuel 16:14)
God had forsaken, departed from, Saul. How does something like that happen? God explains.
And the Lord said to Moses, "Behold, you are about to lie down with your fathers. Then this people will rise and whore after the foreign gods among them in the land that they are entering, and they will forsake me and break my covenant that I have made with them. Then my anger will be kindled against them in that day, and I will forsake them and hide my face from them, and they will be devoured. And many evils and troubles will come upon them, so that they will say in that day, ‘Have not these evils come upon us because our God is not among us?’" Deuteronomy 31.16-17
Did you see the progression? God forsakes those who have forsaken Him. Our psalmist friend is aware of this. And that's why he prays as he does.
But notice what he presents as a reason for God not to forsake him. 'I will keep your statutes.' What is this? Does our friend hope to be kept safe by Law-keeping? Has he placed his hope in his doing the right thing? That sounds like someone trying to save himself by his doing, his works. That can't be right. So, how do we understand this bit of Scripture? Well, go back to what God said to Moses, quoted above. Why did God forsake His people? They broke the covenant that God made with them. By those first words the psalmist is saying, 'I won't do that. I will keep our covenant. I will do that by obeying Your statutes.' So, here we see the Spirit is stressing the importance of obedience to what God has commanded. Elsewhere, He shows that the kind of obedience that does, in fact, keep the covenant is 'the obedience of faith', the obedience that comes from a heart of faith. (Romans 1.5)
So, we see that God does, in fact, forsake some. He forsakes those who break the covenant that they have with God. They refuse to obey. Keeping that covenant is a matter of faith expressing itself as obedience to the commands of God.