Job 38:21

"Did you know then that you would be born?" These words are not said without purpose but to demonstrate that God's benevolence is the reason for everything. If you owe the fact that you exist to my benevolence, since you did not exist before, he says, how can you think that [benevolence] is denied to you, now that you live and are able to function?

"Did you know that you had to be born? Did you know the number of your years? You have been able to know the road followed by the wicked who are darkness, or remain darkness, because those who have attached themselves to God have first followed these paths of ungodliness before receiving the divine grace, source of their justification: but have you been able to know what reason there was to call you to the perishable life of this world, when our first parents were already entering these paths by the impiety of their disobedience, and that with their hands and of their guilty lips, they called death which made us all die in Adam? It is not from our birth, therefore, that we must reckon the limited number of our years, but from the day when the first to die died. For example, when Abraham came into the world, all of the Hebrews were born to him. The number of our years is therefore great, if we start from the day when death began in the paths of ungodliness. But who remembers to have been at this moment? who remembers to have really existed in the blood of his ancestors? For no one remembers the very epoch of his own birth; and yet it is certain that then he had the being, the life and the feeling. But all these things are known to the eternal Wisdom, who created everything, not only what lives in heaven; but still what is subject to death. Now Christ is the Force of God and the Wisdom of God (1); he knows all these mysteries. He was born to die, not because he was condemned to it, but, free among the captives of death, he pitied him and broke their chains.

Didst thou know then that thou wast about to be born, and didst thou know the number of thy days? As if He were openly saying, What wonder if thou understandest not thine end, since thou dost not comprehend thy beginning? And since thou knowest not with what beginning thou camest hither, what wonder, if thou canst not tell with what end thou art taken away? If therefore it was My work to bring thee forward from secresy to sight at thy beginning, it will be Mine also to bring thee back from sight to secresy. Why complainest thou aught of the dispensation of thy life, who, ignorant of thyself, art supported by the hand of thy Creator? Thou oughtest therefore to boast thyself the less in what thou dost, the more thou art confined within the bosom of eternity, and knowest not either in what order thou earnest hither, nor when, or how thou art taken hence. But these words can yet be understood in another sense also; Didst thou know then that thou wast about to be born, and didst thou know the number of thy days? Thou understandest, As I, Who knew that I was about to be born, because, even before the birth of My Manhood, I always existed substantially in the Godhead. For men begin then to exist, when they are born in the womb of their mothers. For even the very conception is called nativity, according to that which is written, That which is born in her is of the Holy Ghost. And they therefore know not that they are about to be born, because they do not exist, before they are created. But God, Who ever existed without beginning, foresaw this of Himself, that He assumed a beginning in the womb of the Virgin; and because He foreknew, He ordained it; and because He ordained, He doubtless endured nothing in human form, except of His own free will. Let man then, who could not foresee his own birth, be reproved for complaining of his scourges, if even He, Who foresaw and ordained His own birth, prepared Himself for scourges amongst men.