A sharp rebuke is directed at those who attempt to conceal their intentions and actions from the Creator. At the heart of this behavior lies a profound conceptual failure: the belief that hiding secrets from human eyes simultaneously shields those actions from God's awareness. People retreat deep into their own minds to scheme and hide their thoughts [אבן עזרא, מצודת דוד ומצודת ציון], using their very hearts as a hiding place for their plans [שד״ל].
The primary approach among commentators is that this criticism targets individuals who deny personal divine providence. They perform their misdeeds in the shadows to avoid human detection, and through spiritual blindness, they assume that if no person sees them, God is equally unaware. Historically, this secrecy played out when the nation secretly plotted to rely on the power of Egypt. Because they knew that the righteous King Hezekiah and the Prophet Isaiah would fiercely oppose this political strategy, they deliberately kept their plans hidden from them [שד״ל].
On a deeper level, this addresses a more complex intellectual denial. Some individuals delved into philosophical inquiry only to argue that God does not oversee the specific actions of humanity. They claimed that because God is entirely one and unchanging, He cannot know the shifting choices of humans who possess free will, since learning of a newly formed scheme would imply a change within Him. Furthermore, they argued that since God has no physical body or senses, He cannot observe the material world. They believed their actions remained safely in the dark, assuming that earthly matter and darkness could never intersect with the supreme divine light.
The fundamental mistake of these thinkers was equating divine knowledge with human knowledge. Human beings acquire information through their physical senses by observing an already existing reality. In contrast, God's knowledge is the very force that creates and grants reality to all things. Therefore, His awareness does not rely on physical senses, is not derived from the material world, and is completely unlimited [מלבי״ם ואברבנאל].