God asks 'Can you send forth lightnings, that they may go and say to you, Here we are?' asking whether Job can command lightning to serve his purposes. The personification of lightning as able to communicate and respond suggests that natural forces have a kind of agency or consciousness. Job's inability to command lightning to do his bidding establishes that natural phenomena serve divine purposes, not human ones. The poetic suggestion that lightning might answer 'Here we are' if summoned playfully establishes the gap between human wishes and actual power. The accumulation of questions about commanding natural phenomena is approaching a conclusion: Job commands nothing, understands little, and yet presumes to judge the one who commands all. The structural logic of God's questions becomes increasingly clear: to undermine Job's ground for complaint by establishing radical asymmetry between human and divine agency and knowledge.

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