(Jeremiah 23:23-24, ESV)
Most of us have said it at one time or another. The day gets full, the demands pile up, and somewhere in the middle of it all we mutter, “I wish there were two of me.” It’s a familiar feeling. We’re bound by where we are. We can only be in one place at a time, and the older we get, the more we feel the weight of that. There’s simply never enough of us to go around.
God had something to say about that in Jeremiah 23. In the middle of a passage addressing false prophets who were living double lives, he asked a pair of questions no one could answer. “Am I a God at hand, declares the LORD, and not a God far away? Can a man hide himself in secret places so that I cannot see him? declares the LORD. Do I not fill heaven and earth? declares the LORD” (Jer. 23:23-24, ESV).
The implied answer is obvious. He fills heaven and earth. He is not confined to one place, not bound by geography or distance. While we struggle to be fully present even where we are, God is fully present everywhere, all at once. Psalm 139:8 puts it plainly — there is nowhere we can go that is outside his reach. Not the highest height, not the lowest depth.
We’re also limited by time in a way God simply is not. We feel it constantly. There aren’t enough hours. We lose track of days. Seasons come and go faster than we expect. But the God who spoke to Jeremiah exists outside of all that. He has no beginning and no end. He is the Alpha and the Omega (Rev. 1:8, ESV). What looks to us like history unfolding is, from his vantage point, already known, already held.
The fact that God has no boundaries is genuinely hard to take in. Everything in our experience has limits. Every person, every relationship, every resource runs out eventually. And then there is God, for whom none of that is true. It’s the kind of thing worth sitting with quietly rather than rushing past.
What strikes me about this passage is not just the theology of it. It’s what that theology means for the rest of life. We serve a God who can be with the grieving mother and the wandering prodigal at the same moment. He is not stretched thin. He is not having to choose. His presence with one person in no way reduces his presence with another.
And this God — unlimited, everywhere, outside of time — is the one who has moved toward us. He can do anything, including forgive us and bring us into his own family. That is not a small thing. The God who fills heaven and earth has made room for us.
We may spend our days wishing there were more of us to go around. But the One who is actually unlimited has given us his full attention. That ought to change how we walk through an ordinary day.
Central Haywood Church of Christ 