Jeremiah is preaching in Jerusalem in the last decades before Babylon levels it. The chapter is aimed at false prophets — men who claim dreams from the LORD while telling the king what he wants to hear. Jeremiah's accusation is that they have shrunk God to a local, manageable, distant figure who does not actually see the politics of the temple courtyard. So God himself interrupts: he is near, and he is everywhere. The verses are not abstract theology about omnipresence. They are a courtroom subpoena delivered to clergy who thought distance gave them cover.

From the writers we read together

Michael S. Heiser

biblical scholar, author of The Unseen Realm

Heiser spent a great deal of energy distinguishing Yahweh from the lesser elohim of the divine council. The other gods are real, but they are bounded — territorial, located, assigned. Yahweh is not. Jeremiah 23:24 is one of the verses Heiser pointed to in order to make that case: the God of Israel fills heaven and earth. He is not a regional deity who can be escaped by crossing a border, and he is not a deity in the council who can be flattered by a prophet's dreams. He is of a different category entirely.

That distinction matters pastorally because the false prophets in Jeremiah's day were essentially treating Yahweh like one of the surrounding gods — far enough away to be negotiated with. We do this too, in subtler forms. We act as if certain rooms are off the map, certain hours unobserved, certain interior conversations private. Heiser's reading of the two-tier cosmos cuts that off. The lesser elohim may be local. The LORD is not. There is no secret place in the geography of the universe where his gaze does not already arrive.