And God questions Job out of a whirlwind:
So after the Lord rejected the determination of Eliud, he himself begins to determine the question. First, he gets Job’s attention when he says, “Gird up your loins like a man,” which here is used as a metaphor. For men usually gird up their loins in preparation for a journey or some work. The Lord therefore wanted Job to be ready to consider what he said to him by removing every impediment. So he clearly tells him to gird up his loins, because loins metaphorically mean carnal desires which block spiritual attention in a special way as Isaiah says, “To whom will he teach knowledge, and whom will he make understand what has been heard? Those who have been weaned from milk, those taken from the breast.” (28:9)
First, he begins in his determination to accuse Job for seeming to have spoken presumptuously when he provoked God to discussion. Since Job seems to have given God two options when he said, “Call me and I will answer you, and let me speak and you answer me,” (13:22) and as Job had already said enough, the Lord, as though he choosing the second alternative, says, “let me speak and you answer me.” God certainly does not question to learn, but to convince man of his ignorance. He questions Job about his effects which are accessible to the experience of the human senses. When a man is shown to be ignorant of these, he is much even convinced that he does not have knowledge of the higher realities. Among other sensible effects he begins to ask about the principle parts of the earth. Of these earth is more known to us because it is more immediate to our experience. He begins to ask him about this and says, “Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth?” He rightly compares the earth to a foundation because as a foundation is the lowest part of a building, so also the earth is the lowest of bodies and it lies under everything. Since the earth is the principal matter of the human body, matter precedes in time that which is made from it, and even more the plan of the artisan who puts together the matter precedes it. So he clearly says, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth,” as if to say: You cannot know the plan of the foundation of the earth, because when the earth was laid on its foundation you did not yet exist in the nature of things.
Go here to read the rest. Job had sought to argue with God and God shows this is impossible: the difference between creator and created is simply too vast.
