Sez Who? God

1 October 2026  Job 19:21-27

“For I know that my Redeemer lives….”  (Job 19:25)     

A famous article appeared in the Duke Law Journal in 1979 by Arthur Leff, who argued that, apart from God, there does not appear to be any authority that can resolve ultimate moral disputes, and that God, in all likelihood, isn’t there.

Our moral desire is so fierce that we long not so much for happiness as for a kind of rightness, the calmness and confidence that comes from knowing we are doing what we ought to do. Our moral convictions don’t feel like opinions; they feel like law.

He called it the Grand “Sez Who” Problem. With no final arbiter, it is always just my moral claims against yours. Leff finished his article with this dark sonnet:

All I can say is this: it looks as if we are all we have. Given what we know about ourselves and each other, this is an extraordinarily unappetizing prospect; looking around the world, it appears that if all men are brothers, the ruling model is Cain and Abel. Neither reason, nor even terror, seems to have worked to make us good, and worse than that, there is no reason why anything should.

            Nevertheless:

            Napalming babies is bad.

            Starving the poor is wicked.

            Buying and selling each other is depraved.

Those who stood up and died resisting Hitler, Stalin, Amin and Pol Pot – and General Custer, too   – have earned salvation.

            Those who acquiesced deserve to be damned.

            There is in the world such a thing as evil.

            [All together now:] Sez Who?

            God help us.

This is the step Job could not take. He refused to believe in a world where all his moral intuitions were nonsense. He insisted on a story that affirmed a common moral and spiritual ground: “I know that my Redeemer lives!” (19:25). It was created by God, and we have known it since the very moment we learned what the word “moral” meant. Professor J. Budziszewski of the University of Texas puts it bluntly as only a Texan can:

The common moral truths are no less plain to us today than they ever were. Our problem is not that there isn’t a common moral ground, but that we would rather stand somewhere else. We are not in Dante’s inferno, where even the sinners acknowledge the law which they have violated. We are in some other hell. The denizens of our hell say that they don’t know the law – or that there is no law – or that each makes the law for himself.

            And they all know better.

Our moral feelings and intuitions are among the very strongest features of our interior life. They produce intense human emotions like shame, pride and rage. Our moral knowledge is so foundational that we don’t argue for it but from it. Our moral desire is so fierce that we long not so much for happiness as for a kind of rightness, the calmness and confidence that comes from knowing we are doing what we ought to do. Our moral convictions don’t feel like opinions; they feel like law, so much so that a majority of philosophers (56.4% in 2025) consistently agree that our moral feelings and intuitions point to something real, not something illusory or imaginary. Given all this, we have to ask ourselves: In what kind of story does our moral sense make sense?

For Job (as for all of us, if we are going to be honest with ourselves) it is the story that has God as its author, and heaven as its objective. Any other story reduces morality finally to biology, and if all morality is reducible to biology, then what the Nazis did to the Jews is on the same level as a shark eating a surfer. Those with power augment their personal well-being at the expense of those without power. If any other story is true, then facilities for killing the elderly would be morally indistinguishable from nursing homes. It might be distasteful to exterminate Grammy and Grampa, but on any other story, there would be no ground for calling it wrong.

Even in the midst of his suffering, Job could not live with that, and neither can we.

We know that our Redeemer lives, too.