Jer 23:23-24 ('Am I a God near by, says the Lord, and not a God far off? Who can hide in secret places so that I cannot see them?... Do I not fill heaven and earth?') and Ps 139:7-10 ('Where can I go from your spirit? Or where can I flee from your presence? If I ascend to heaven, you are there; if I make my bed in Sheol, you are there...') are cited as proof-texts for divine omnipresence.

The apparent contradiction trades on a category error the objection itself invites but Scripture and classical theology do not commit: it treats 'presence' as univocal, as though every biblical statement about where God is must be describing the same kind of spatial fact. Aquinas's treatment of divine omnipresence (Summa Theologiae I, q.8) supplies the needed distinction. Aquinas argues God is in all things 'by essence, presence, and power' (per essentiam, praesentiam, et potentiam): by power, because everything is subject to his causality; by presence, because everything lies immediately open to his knowledge; by essence, because he is present to everything as the direct sustaining cause of its very existence (esse) at every instant — not as a thing that once set the world in motion and now sits somewhere within it. This is a metaphysically load-bearing claim, not the crude picture (which the objection implicitly relies on) of God as a gas or fluid physically diffused through space so as to spatially overlap with everything, the way one extended body might overlap another. That picture is not a stronger form of omnipresence but a category mistake — treating an incorporeal, simple being as if it had spatial parts distributed across a volume, which would actually contradict divine simplicity (a God with spatial extension would have separable parts, exactly what classical theism denies). God is present to space the way a cause is present to its effect, immediately and without composition, not the way one extended object overlaps another. Within that framework, the 'coming down' language of Gen 3:8, 11:5, and 18:21 is not a rival metaphysical claim about God's literal location but anthropomorphic, phenomenological accommodation — Scripture speaking of God's actions in terms graspable by embodied, spatially located creatures (the classical 'accommodation' principle articulated by Calvin's image of God 'lisping' to us as a nurse lisps to an infant, and developed by John Walton's work on how the Bible communicates within, without necessarily endorsing, ancient Near Eastern phenomenological categories). Gen 18 is instructive on its own terms: the narrator has already told the reader in v.1 that 'the LORD appeared to Abraham' — this is theophany, a chosen mode of self-disclosure, not God relocating his being. And the 'I will go down and see' of v.21 functions as forensic idiom — the language of a judge who must conduct due process and investigate before pronouncing sentence, a literary convention for the deliberateness and justice of divine judgment (noted by commentators such as Nahum Sarna and Robert Alter on the idiom of 'going down to see' in Genesis), not a confession of prior ignorance requiring travel to correct — which is precisely why the narrative can, without any felt tension, have God already discussing the coming judgment with Abraham in the same scene (Gen 18:17-19) before the 'investigation' occurs.

Omnipresence is not an arbitrary add-on attribute but a necessary corollary of God's role as the sustaining cause of all contingent being, per the classical arguments from contingency and motion. Anything that exists at any point in space requires, at every instant of its existence, a cause presently sustaining it in being (continuous creation/conservation, creatio continua, not a single push at the beginning); since God is the ultimate sustaining cause of everything that exists, he cannot fail to be immediately, causally present to literally everything that exists, everywhere, at all times — his causal 'presence' just is what keeps anything anywhere in existence from moment to moment. Paul makes exactly this move at the Areopagus, quoting a Greek poet but drawing a genuinely theological conclusion: 'in him we live and move and have our being' (Acts 17:28) — not a claim that we are spatially inside God like water in a jar, but that our very existence and activity are immediately dependent on and upheld by his causal presence at every instant. An analogy, imperfect but clarifying: a king's authority and rule fill his entire kingdom continuously, yet he can still make a special, localized royal visit or establish a throne room in one city without having been 'absent' from the rest of the kingdom the whole time he was elsewhere unvisited. The analogy is imperfect because a king's kingdom-wide presence is merely jurisdictional/legal, while God's is a metaphysical, causal omnipresence grounding the very existence of the kingdom and the king — but it illustrates why a localized, intensified theophanic manifestation and an unqualified sustaining omnipresence are not competitors. God can choose to manifest his presence with special covenantal intensity at the burning bush, in the pillar of cloud and fire, or in the tabernacle's Shekinah glory, without ever having been metaphysically absent from Midian, Egypt, or anywhere else in the interim.