Proverbs 6:16-19: Seven Things God Hates and Why It Matters
Short answer: Proverbs 6:16-19 lists seven things Yahweh hates: a proud look, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked plans, feet that are swift in running to mischief, a false witness who utters lies, and one who sows discord among brothers. God does not merely dislike these things; the text calls them an abomination to him. The passage is not a random list of vices but a portrait of a person whose life is turned against God and neighbor. Hatred of sin belongs to God's holiness. He is not indifferent to evil, and his eyes examine the children of men, as Psalm 11:4 says, "Yahweh is in his holy temple. Yahweh is on his throne in heaven. His eyes observe. His eyes examine the children of men." Because God is holy, sin is never a small matter to him.
The list itself: six, then seven
The opening line of Proverbs 6:16 says, "There are six things which Yahweh hates; yes, seven which are an abomination to him." This Hebrew pattern uses a numbered saying to build emphasis. Six is already a complete count, but seven drives the point home. The writer is not saying God hates exactly six or seven and no more. He is naming a category of conduct that God detests, and the saying style invites us to pay attention. In wisdom literature, lists like this function as a mirror. They are not merely ancient moral codes but a way of exposing what is already in the human heart.
Notice that the list moves from outward acts to inward roots and back again. The first item is a proud look, a matter of the eyes and the heart. Then the lying tongue, then hands that shed innocent blood, then a heart that devises wicked plans. Then feet that run to mischief. Then a false witness, and finally one who sows discord among brothers. The body is fully engaged: eyes, tongue, hands, heart, feet, mouth, and social life. The wisdom writer is showing that sin is never isolated. It spreads through the whole person and through the community.
This pattern also explains why the list ends where it does. The most dramatic crimes, like shedding blood, sit close to common sins like lying and gossip. That arrangement is deliberate. In God's sight, a false witness and a trouble-maker are not minor matters. They belong to the same family of rebellion. James makes a similar point when he writes that friendship with the world is hostility toward God. The question is not whether sin is small or large by human standards, but whether it is against a holy God.
When we read Proverbs 6:16-19, we should not imagine a God who is petty or easily irritated. The Hebrew word for abomination describes something that repels in a moral sense. It is the reaction of perfect goodness to what is corrupt. A surgeon recoils from disease because he loves the body and wants it whole. God hates sin because he loves what sin destroys. The seven things in this passage are all things that ruin people, relationships, and communities. God's hatred is not the opposite of his love; it is his love refusing to make peace with what kills.
The proud look and the lying tongue
The first thing listed is a proud look, literally lofty eyes. Pride is pictured in the eyes because the eyes reveal what the heart is doing. The proud person looks down on others and up at his own image. In Scripture, pride is not merely thinking too highly of yourself. It is a refusal to be honest about who you are before God. It is the original sin of the serpent, promising a better position than God had given. It is a posture, not just a moment. Proverbs consistently treats pride as the root from which many other sins grow.
The second and seventh items both involve speech, and they frame the list with a warning about words. The lying tongue appears early; a false witness who utters lies appears near the end. This repetition is not accidental. The wisdom writer wants us to feel the weight of our words. Lying is not a harmless social lubricant. It breaks trust, hides what is true, and damages the person lied against. It is a direct attack on the character of God, who is truth and who cannot lie. If we claim to belong to him, our words should reflect who he is.
Proud eyes and lying lips often travel together. Pride needs a cover story. The moment we want to be seen a certain way, we begin to manage the truth. We exaggerate our accomplishments and minimize our failures. We shade the story to make ourselves look better. That is the beginning of a lie. Proverbs is not describing outrageous criminals only. It is describing the ordinary way human beings protect their self-image. The first step away from wisdom is often a small piece of self-deception spoken out loud.
This is why God hates pride and lying so deeply. They attack the foundation of fellowship. You cannot love God and lie about yourself. You cannot love others and deceive them. Truthfulness is not a secondary virtue; it is the air a believer breathes. The call of Proverbs is to see ourselves honestly before God. Psalm 5:4-6 says, "For you are not a God who has pleasure in wickedness. Evil can’t live with you." God's kingdom is not built on self-promotion and spin. It is built on truth spoken in love, and it begins with honesty about our own hearts.
Hands that shed innocent blood, feet that run to mischief
The third item is a wide phrase: hands that shed innocent blood. In its original setting, this includes murder and judicial injustice. Hands are the instrument of violence, and the innocent are those who do not deserve what is done to them. But Scripture also treats bloodguilt as a broader category. It includes the powerful who crush the weak, the powerful who look away while others suffer, and the systems that quietly sacrifice people for gain. Proverbs speaks to a world where violence is real. The wise person does not treat human life as cheap, because every person is made in God's image.
The fifth item is a pair of feet: feet that are swift in running to mischief. The image is of eagerness. Sinners in Proverbs are not lazy; they are eager. They cannot wait to do wrong. They run toward trouble because they have come to love it. The heart has been twisted so that the wrong thing has become attractive. This is what happens when sin is cherished rather than confessed. The first step toward mischief eventually becomes a sprint. Feet that once walked hesitantly into a small compromise soon run into open rebellion. The heart sets the direction; the feet follow.
Between the hands and the feet sits a fourth item: a heart that devises wicked plans. The Hebrew word behind devising has to do with planning, calculating, and scheming. This is not a sudden impulse. It is premeditated evil. The wicked person turns evil over in his mind, working out how to accomplish it. The heart is the workshop, and sin is manufactured there. Jesus made the same point when he said that out of the heart come evil thoughts, murders, adulteries, and the like. What we do outwardly begins as what we rehearse inwardly, whether we are aware of it or not.
Put together, these three items describe a person who plans harm, carries it out, and rushes toward it with pleasure. The text is not describing a moment of weakness. It is describing a settled direction of life. This is why the passage does not simply call these things mistakes. It calls them an abomination. God sees the scheming as clearly as he sees the act. He sees the eagerness in the feet. Nothing is hidden from his eyes, and his judgment is not limited to the final deed. It reaches back to the heart that dreamed it up. That is sobering, but it is also good news, because it means that the person who repents and turns from sin is not merely cleaning up outward behavior. He is inviting God to transform the workshop itself.
A false witness and a sower of discord
The sixth item is a false witness who utters lies. This is the most legal and public item in the list. In a world without modern forensics, a witness could decide a case. A false witness could send an innocent person to death and let a guilty person go free. The ninth commandment forbids bearing false witness, and the wisdom writer places this sin among the things God hates most. It is not just a personal failure; it is a social betrayal. It undermines the justice that holds a community together. God cares deeply about courts and truth-telling because he cares about people, especially the weak who cannot defend themselves.
The seventh and final item is one who sows discord among brothers. The Hebrew word behind sowing is agricultural: scattering seed. The troublemaker scatters words and rumors until a harvest of conflict grows. He may not intend to destroy the community; he may simply enjoy being at the center of drama. But the effect is the same. Brothers are separated, friendships are broken, and the family of God becomes a battlefield. Notice that this is the last of the seven. In wisdom literature, the final item is often the climax. God hates the sower of discord because he destroys the very thing God is building: a people united in love.
There is a bitter irony in the list. The first item is pride, and the last is discord among brothers. Pride always ends in division. When I think I must be above others, I will eventually push others down. When I cannot admit I am wrong, I will blame someone else. When my reputation matters more than the truth, I will slander whoever threatens it. The troublemaker is often a deeply insecure person with a proud heart. That does not excuse the sin, but it helps us understand it. The road from proud eyes to a divided church is short, and every step is downhill.
The church has always been vulnerable to this sin. We are not called to uniformity, but we are called to unity. There is a difference between a hard conversation that seeks truth and a whispered rumor that seeks influence. There is a difference between disagreeing about convictions and stirring up suspicion for the pleasure of it. Proverbs does not tell us to avoid all conflict; some conflict is faithful. But it does tell us that God hates the person who scatters conflict for its own sake. If we want to please the Lord, we must be peacemakers, not merely peacekeepers. We must build bridges, not spread suspicion, and we must do it in a way that honors the truth.
Where the hatred of sin meets the patience of God
Habakkuk 1:13 gives us the language of a prophet wrestling with this very issue. He prays to the God with purer eyes than to see evil. He knows God cannot look on perversity with approval. And yet he sees the wicked swallowing up the man who is more righteous than he, and he asks why God tolerates it. This is the same tension many of us feel when we read a list like Proverbs 6:16-19. If God hates these things, why do they seem to flourish? Why do lies succeed and pride get promoted? Habakkuk gives us permission to bring that question to God honestly.
The answer the prophet receives is not a comfortable one. God is not indifferent. He is patient, and his patience is not the same as approval. The wicked are not forgotten; judgment is real, and it will come. Romans 1:18 says, "For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and unrighteousness of men who suppress the truth in unrighteousness." The wrath of God is not a hot-tempered fit; it is his settled opposition to everything that destroys. It is the holy response of a good God to evil that refuses to repent. That is the same reality Proverbs describes when it calls these things an abomination.
But the patience of God is also mercy. Every day we live is another day to repent. The fact that proud eyes, lying tongues, and scheming hearts are still going on does not mean God has changed his mind. It means he is giving people time. The call of Scripture is to stop presuming on that patience and start responding to it. The same God who hates sin offers forgiveness to sinners. The list in Proverbs is not meant to drive us to despair but to honest confession. When we see ourselves in it, the right response is not to argue with God's standard but to turn to the One who kept it perfectly on our behalf.
This is where the passage leads us. God hates these things, and we should hate them too, but not in a self-righteous way. The proper response to Proverbs 6:16-19 is not to look around at other people and shake our heads. It is to look in the mirror and ask God to search us and know us. The one who is honest about his own pride, lies, and scheming hearts is in a position to receive mercy. The one who hides them is not. The list is meant to make us run to the cross, not to make us feel superior. That is the wisdom the preacher of Proverbs is after.
Applying the seven things to ordinary life
It is easy to read a list like this and file it away as ancient poetry. But these are ordinary sins, and they show up in ordinary places. Pride shows up in the way we talk about our work, our children, our church, and our opinions. A lying tongue shows up in the way we explain why we are late or why we did not keep our word. A heart that devises wicked plans shows up in the way we scheme for advantage in a meeting or in a family conflict. The point is not to become morbidly introspective but to recognize that God's hatred of sin is not limited to the dramatic. He sees the small things too, and that is exactly why we need to bring the small things into his light.
For the believer, the answer is not to try harder in our own strength. It is to walk with the Spirit and to build habits that make these sins harder to hide. Confession is one such habit. Honesty about our sin to God and, where appropriate, to trusted people breaks the power of secrecy. Another habit is self-examination through Scripture. The Proverbs are especially useful here. Reading one chapter a day and asking how it applies to your own life is a simple discipline that exposes the heart. If you want to know whether pride or gossip or lying has a foothold in you, ask the people who know you best and who love you enough to tell you the truth.
For the church, Proverbs 6:16-19 gives us a picture of what to protect. We should be a community where lying is not tolerated, where pride is not celebrated, and where conflict is not stirred up for entertainment. That does not mean pretending to be perfect. It means creating a culture where repentance is normal and truth is spoken in love. When someone confesses a lie, the response should be grace, not shame. When someone stirs up division, the response should be a gentle and firm call to stop, not a private voting block. A church that takes these seven things seriously will be a church that God can use.
Finally, we should remember that Proverbs is about wisdom for living, and wisdom always points beyond itself. The person who perfectly hated sin and perfectly loved sinners is Jesus. He is the one who never had a proud look, never lied, never devised wickedness, and never sowed discord. He took the judgment that our sins deserved so that we could be forgiven and changed. If you are in Christ, God's hatred of sin is not aimed at you anymore; it was poured out on him. And because of that, the same love that moved him to hate sin now moves us to fight it, not to earn anything, but out of gratitude for what we have received.
Biblical fidelity check
What does Proverbs 6:16-19 actually establish? It establishes that God has a settled moral opposition to certain kinds of conduct and that this opposition is rooted in his character. It does not establish that God hates people in the sense of foreordaining them to destruction without hope. It also does not establish that these seven sins are the only things God hates. The numbered saying is a representative list, a window into God's holiness, not an exhaustive catalogue. The passage describes what God detests and warns the reader against it. It also does not tell us that people who commit these things cannot be saved. In fact, the rest of Scripture tells us the opposite. Every believer has committed some of these things and has been forgiven. The list is a warning, not a death sentence, for the one who repents.
A common misreading is to treat God's hatred of sin as if it were the same thing as human hatred. Human hatred is often tinged with selfishness, malice, and a desire for revenge. God's hatred is the pure reaction of perfect goodness to what is evil. It is not irrational, petty, or inconsistent. It is the very thing that makes God trustworthy, because a God who did not hate evil would not be good enough to be trusted with justice. Another misreading is to use the list as a weapon against others while excusing the same sins in ourselves. Jesus warned against the hypocrisy of straining out a gnat while swallowing a camel. The list should first search our own hearts. Only then can we speak to others about God's standard. And even then, we speak with humility, knowing that we too have been forgiven much.
Other passages that speak to Proverbs 6:16-19
Several related passages help us understand God's opposition to sin and his patience with sinners. Romans 9 explores God's sovereignty in showing mercy and justice, which is the larger frame for understanding his hatred of sin and his patience with those who have not yet repented. The prophet Habakkuk wrestles openly with the tension of God's holiness and the apparent success of the wicked, and those studies are helpful companions to this passage. God’s Sovereignty in Salvation: Mercy, Justice, and Humility Before Romans 9 shows how God's freedom to show mercy does not compromise his justice. Habakkuk 1: When God Seems Silent walks through the prophet's honest complaint and God's answer. Habakkuk 2:14 Prophecy: The Earth Filled with the LORD’s Glory points to the day when God's glory will fill the earth and sin will be dealt with fully. Habakkuk 3:17–19 Prophecy: Rejoicing in God When the Harvest Fails shows how faith can rejoice in God even when circumstances are hard, because God's character does not change.
Frequently asked questions
Does Proverbs 6:16-19 mean God hates specific people?
The passage says God hates certain actions and calls them an abomination. It lists attitudes and behaviors, not individuals by name. Scripture elsewhere says God takes no pleasure in the death of the wicked but desires repentance. The list is a warning meant to turn us away from sin, not a declaration that some people are beyond hope. The proper response is to take the warning seriously and bring our own hearts to God in repentance, trusting his mercy rather than presuming on it or despairing of it.
Why does the list say six, then seven?
This is a common Hebrew poetic device. The writer begins with a number and then adds one, building emphasis. It is similar to saying, here are six things, and here is the seventh, which is the climax. It does not mean there are only seven sins God hates. It means these are a representative and pointed set. The final item, sowing discord among brothers, is often the climactic one in this kind of saying, which tells us how seriously God views division among his people.
How should a Christian respond to a passage like this?
The right response is humble self-examination, honest confession, and trust in Jesus, who bore the judgment our sins deserved. We should ask God to search us and reveal where pride, lying, scheming, or stirring up conflict has taken root. Then we should turn from it and pursue truth, humility, and peace. This is not about earning favor with God. It is about living in gratitude for the mercy we have already received and letting God's holiness shape the way we treat him and one another.
