God Answers
Can you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’? Job 38:35 · Berean Standard Bible
Can you send lightning where you want it to go? And when you do, does it answer to you like a servant reporting for duty?
Lightning is the most powerful, most dangerous phenomenon God has asked about yet. The image of it 'reporting' to Job ('Here we are') is almost humorous—it shows how absurd the idea is. Lightning obeys no one; it's utterly beyond human command. Job would certainly recognize the ridiculousness of having lightning answer to him.
God is speaking
Lightning becomes a symbol of ultimate power and unpredictability. Only God commands it. For Job, who has endured sudden, devastating losses (his children, his health), this might be a subtle acknowledgment that his suffering came from forces he could never control or reason with.
God asks whether Job dispatches lightning bolts along their trajectories and whether they report back to him as obedient agents.
The Hebrew בְרַק (beraq, 'lightning') here becomes an agent awaiting commands. The phrase 'Here we are' (הִנֵּנוּ, hinenu) echoes the standard response to divine summons (cf. Abraham's 'Here I am' in Genesis 22:1). This personalizes lightning as servants under divine commission—transforming meteorological phenomena into obedient agents of God's will. Medieval Jewish philosophy (Maimonides, Guide for the Perplexed, II.6) wrestled with whether such language describes literal agency or poetic personification.
God, depicting natural forces as subordinate agents responding to command.
This reinforces the theological conviction that creation operates through obedience—not mechanical causation but responsive relationality to divine will.
33Do you know the laws of the heavens? Can you set their dominion over the earth?
34Can you command the clouds so that a flood of water covers you?
35Can you send the lightning bolts on their way? Do they report to you, ‘Here we are’?
36Who has put wisdom in the heart or given understanding to the mind?
37Who has the wisdom to count the clouds? Or who can tilt the water jars of the heavens
Read all of Job 38 — After thirty-seven chapters of debate, God finally speaks — not to answer Job's questions, but to reveal who is asking them.
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