Catholic Commentary
Yahweh's Omnipresence: No Hiding from God
23“Am I a God at hand,” says Yahweh, “and not a God afar off?24Can anyone hide himself in secret places so that I can’t see him?” says Yahweh. “Don’t I fill heaven and earth?” says Yahweh.
Jeremiah 23:23–24 presents God's omnipresence and transcendence as paradoxical truths: He is neither a manageable household deity nor a distant cosmic force, but rather fills all heaven and earth while remaining infinitely near and far simultaneously. The passage indicts the false prophets of Jeremiah's era for assuming God could not witness their deceptions, establishing divine omniscience as both comfort and judgment.
God is not a local deity you can consult and then ignore—He fills heaven and earth, seeing and sustaining every hidden corner of your life, and no one can construct a space beyond His sight.
Jeremiah 23:23 — "Am I a God at hand, says Yahweh?"
The Hebrew particle hă introduces a question that expects a negative answer — but it is a deliberately paradoxical negative. Yahweh is NOT merely a "God at hand" (ʾĕlōhê miqqārōb), meaning a near god in the limited, pagan sense: a household deity, a local shrine-god, a manageable religious fixture who can be consulted when convenient and ignored when inconvenient. The false prophets of Jeremiah's day had in effect domesticated the divine — they dreamed their own dreams (v. 25–28), spoke from their own imaginations, and behaved as if Yahweh were a regional patron who could be invoked for legitimacy but not feared as a moral witness to their lives. The rhetorical question exposes this theological shallowness. Yet — and this is crucial — the verse does NOT say God is only far. The contrast with verse 24 reveals the full paradox: He is both infinitely near (immanent) and infinitely beyond (transcendent). This double quality is not a tension to be resolved but a truth to be inhabited.
Jeremiah 23:24 — "Can anyone hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him?"
The Hebrew mistārîm (secret places, hiding places) echoes the garden of Eden, where Adam and Eve hid among the trees (Gen 3:8–10) — the original human attempt to construct a space outside God's sight. Yahweh's answer here is total: there is no such space. The verse then pivots immediately to the positive affirmation: "Do I not fill heaven and earth?" — hăʾănî lōʾ-ʾămalēʾ ʾet-haššāmayim wĕʾet-hāʾāreṣ. This is one of the Old Testament's most direct statements of divine omnipresence and immensity (immensitas Dei). Heaven and earth together constitute the totality of created reality in Hebrew cosmological shorthand (Gen 1:1). To say God fills both is to say there is no created space He does not pervade.
Narrative and contextual flow: These two verses form the theological backbone of Jeremiah 23:9–40, the oracle against the false prophets. The prophets of Baal had led Israel into apostasy; now Yahweh's own appointed prophets in Jerusalem are doing the same — prophesying "peace, peace" when there is no peace (6:14), validating wickedness, claiming visions they have not received. Yahweh's omnipresence is not abstract here; it is juridical and prophetic. It means: I saw what you did. I heard what you said. I know the dreams you invented. The immensity of God is simultaneously comfort and indictment.
Typological and spiritual senses: In the typological reading favored by the Fathers, these verses anticipate the Incarnation as the supreme act of divine nearness — God not merely filling creation from the outside but entering it personally in the flesh (Jn 1:14). The Word who fills heaven and earth became small enough to be held in a manger. Yet the spiritual sense deepens the warning: false prophecy is not merely an ancient problem. Any teacher, preacher, or theologian who speaks in Christ's name while living as though God cannot see the interior life is repeating Jeremiah's target. The anagogical sense gestures toward final judgment, where all hidden things will be revealed (Rom 2:16; 1 Cor 4:5).
Catholic theology has given precise doctrinal form to what Jeremiah 23:23–24 proclaims poetically. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (§300) teaches that God "is not 'the soul of the universe'"— He is not merely immanent in the pantheistic sense — yet He "upholds and sustains" all things, being "present to his creatures' inmost being." This perfectly captures the double movement of the two verses: neither a tribal near-god nor a remote deist abstraction, but the One who transcends creation while pervading it intimately.
St. Thomas Aquinas, in the Summa Theologiae (I, q. 8, aa. 1–3), addresses this passage's teaching directly in his treatise on God's omnipresence, distinguishing God's presence by essence, power, and knowledge — He is present everywhere as the sustaining cause of being, as sovereign lord, and as all-seeing witness. Aquinas notes that creatures cannot exist apart from God's presence any more than an effect can exist apart from its cause.
St. Augustine, wrestling with Manichaean denials of divine omnipresence, cites the theme of these verses in the Confessions (Book I): "You were with me, but I was not with You." The tragedy of sin, for Augustine, is not that we escape God's sight — we cannot — but that we become interiorly absent to the God who remains present to us.
The First Vatican Council (Dei Filius, 1870) formally defined divine immensity as an attribute of the one God. The Magisterium's insistence on this attribute guards against both the false comfort of thinking God does not see private sin and the despairing notion that God is too distant to hear prayer. Both errors are addressed in these two verses of Jeremiah. For false prophets ancient and modern, omnipresence means accountability; for the faithful, it means they are never truly alone.
Contemporary Catholic life is saturated with the digital equivalent of Jeremiah's false prophets — voices that invoke God's name for social currency while presuming that interior duplicity is invisible. But these verses press a more personal question: Where do you hide from God? For many Catholics today, the hiding places are not geographical but psychological — the compartment where professional ethics and faith don't meet, the private screen habits assumed to exist in a God-free zone, the prayer life that is performed for community but hollow in private. Jeremiah 23:24 dismantles all such partitions.
Practically, these verses invite a daily examination of conscience shaped not by anxiety but by the liberating truth that God's omnipresence means no part of our life is beneath His care or beyond His mercy. The same presence that sees sin also sees suffering. The Christian who internalizes this passage is freed from both the arrogance of thinking they can hide wickedness and the despair of thinking they are forgotten. A concrete practice: begin each morning by consciously acknowledging, "You fill heaven and earth — you fill this room, this moment, this heart." Let divine omnipresence become not a surveillance camera but a sanctuary.
Commentary