'God is Not Everywhere' — a counter-heading citing a bare cluster of references without argument prose: Eze 44:1-3, Psalm 102:19, Psalm 150:1, Exodus 33:15, Leviticus 22:3, Numbers 5:2-3, and Deuteronomy 23:12-14.

The objection commits equivocation: it silently imports one sense of 'presence' where the text is using another, then declares a contradiction between them. Old Testament usage regularly distinguishes (without ever using this Latin terminology) between God's general sustaining/cognitive omnipresence and his special covenantal or cultic manifest presence — the kabod YHWH, 'glory of the LORD,' the OT's technical term for a localized, intensified, freely chosen self-disclosure for the purpose of worship and covenant relationship (cf. Exod 40:34-35, the glory filling the tabernacle). The cultic cluster here — Eze 44:1-3 (the sealed gate), Ps 150:1 ('in his sanctuary'), Num 5:2-3 (camp purity 'in the midst of which I dwell'), Lev 22:3 ('cut off from my presence') — belongs to this register: these are statements about where God has chosen to manifest his covenant presence with cultic intensity, and about the ritual and covenantal fitness required to approach that manifestation, not claims that God's being is confined to a gate or a campsite. 'Cut off from my presence' in Lev 22:3 is covenantal-juridical idiom (functionally excommunication from cultic access and covenant standing), the same idiom family as 'hide his face' for withdrawn covenant favor elsewhere in the Torah and Prophets — not a metaphysical claim that God's being retreats spatially. Tellingly, this is not a modern harmonization imposed on the text: Solomon's own temple dedication prayer holds both claims explicitly in the same breath — 'even heaven and the highest heaven cannot contain you, much less this house that I have built' (1 Kings 8:27) — spoken precisely while consecrating that house as the place of God's dwelling. Ancient Israel's own theologians saw no contradiction here because they were not operating with the flattened univocal notion of 'presence' the objection requires. Ps 102:19's 'looked down from heaven' is standard OT phenomenological/spatial idiom for divine transcendence and royal oversight, in the same figurative register as the anthropomorphic hand, eye, and ear language that pervades the Psalter — no serious reader takes 'the eyes of the LORD' (e.g. Ps 34:15) as a claim about literal eyeballs, and the same collection of poems containing Ps 102 also contains Ps 139's explicit denial that Sheol 'below' is outside God's presence, a few dozen psalms later. The Psalter is a collection of prayers and hymns in varied idiom, not a systematic treatise whose images must be harmonized into a single flat metaphysical picture. Exodus 33:15 and Deuteronomy 23:12-14 concern God's special, election-marking guiding presence — the pillar of cloud and fire that distinguishes Israel from every other nation (Exod 33:16 makes this explicit: 'how shall it be known that I have found favor in your sight, I and your people, unless you go with us? In this way, we shall be distinguished... from every people on the face of the earth'). Moses is not asking whether God will cease sustaining the cosmos if he stays behind; he is asking whether the visible, distinguishing theophanic guidance that marks Israel as chosen will accompany the march. Deut 23:14's 'turn away' is the same covenantal idiom for withdrawn favor, tied to the fitness of the camp to host the intensified manifest presence, not a claim that God's underlying being physically relocates outward from a perimeter.

Aquinas's threefold distinction (ST I, q.8, a.3) accounts for exactly this data without strain: God's knowledge and causal power (potentia, praesentia in the cognitive sense) are immediately present to every point in space without exception — nothing is or could be outside the reach of his sustaining causality or knowledge, which covers the 'looking down' texts as genuine cognitive/providential engagement, poetic vantage notwithstanding. Layered on top of that unqualified sustaining omnipresence, God freely wills a further, additional mode of self-disclosure — manifest, felt, covenantal presence (Shekinah glory, the pillar of cloud, the tabernacle) — concentrated at particular places and times for particular redemptive-historical purposes, without that concentration implying absence anywhere else. Solomon's temple prayer (1 Kings 8:27) is the OT's own explicit articulation of this exact resolution, from within the same textual tradition that produced the camp-purity legislation, showing ancient Israel could and did hold metaphysical omnipresence and localized cultic presence together as complementary rather than contradictory.