The Bible does use metaphors

"One hardly escapes the impression that the author does not treat his opponents fairly. He says,

Yet because revelation is given in human words, it cannot be more precise than language allows. [How true! A perfect tautology. But is God, who produced language, unable to use it with perfect precision?] The belief that the Bible consists of statements of literal truth [italics his], therefore, is ill-conceived. [The therefore is a logical fallacy.] The notion of literal truth is quite correct if we oppose literal to the mythical . . . .In this sense we must say that God literally created the world . . . . It is quite another matter, though, if we insist that all the statements of Scripture are literally true.

This sort of argument is hardly fair to the Reformation view because no one from the time of Moses to the present ever said that all statements are strictly literal. Did Luther, Quenstedt, Gaussen, or Warfield ever say so? Of course there are figures of speech, metaphors, anthropomorphisms, and the like. But these would be meaningless if there were no literal statements to give them meaning. For example, 2 Chronicles 16:9 - 'The eyes of the Lord run to and fro throughout the whole earth' - is ludicrously ridiculous if taken literally: little eyeballs rolling over the dusty ground. But unless the statement, God is omniscient, is literal, the figure has nothing to refer to. Surely Hamilton did not publish his book to remind us that the Bible contains some figures of speech. And yet his argument here depends on the alleged fact that someone said 'all the statements of Scripture are literally true.'" - Gordon H. Clark, God's Hammer The Bible and It's Critics


"It is no objection to this, that the parts of an human body are sometimes attributed to God; since these are to be understood of him not in a proper, but in an improper and figurative sense, and denote some act and action, or attribute of his; thus his face denotes his sight and presence, in which all things are, Gen xix. 13, sometimes his favour and good will, and the manifestation of his love and grace, Psal. xxvii. 8, lxxx. 3. and soemtiems his wrath and indignation against wicked men, Psal. xxxiv. 16, Rev vi. 17." - John Gill, The Body of Divinity, Pg. 32


"In metaphors it is necessary that something be different from the real thing, because, as they say, similarity is not identity. At the same time, there must be a likeness between the thing and that which represents it, for otherwise there wouldn't even be a representation." - Martin Luther, Against Latomus