The list God made is shorter than you think, and stranger.
Last winter I picked up a secondhand commentary on Proverbs that someone had marked up with a yellow highlighter. Nearly every page had something underlined. Chapters on adultery were soaked in yellow. The warnings about laziness, highlighted. The passages on foolishness, highlighted. But when I got to chapter six, verses sixteen through nineteen, the page was clean. Unmarked. Whoever owned this book before me had highlighted almost everything in Proverbs and skipped the part where God says what he actually hates.
I sat with that for a while.
What Opens the List
The passage is blunt. Solomon writes that there are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him, and then he names them one at a time. You would expect the first item to be something enormous. Blasphemy, maybe. Violence. Something you could build a sermon series around, something that sounds like it belongs at the top of God’s list.
The first thing on the list is haughty eyes. Pride. The look on someone’s face when they believe they are above the person standing in front of them.
There are six things the Lord hates, seven that are detestable to him: haughty eyes, a lying tongue, hands that shed innocent blood, a heart that devises wicked schemes, feet that are quick to rush into evil, a false witness who pours out lies, and a person who stirs up conflict in the community.
Proverbs 6:16–19 (NIV)
Read the full list slowly and something becomes clear. Six of the seven items are ordinary relational sins. A lying tongue. A scheming heart. Feet that rush toward trouble. A false witness. A person who stirs up conflict among neighbors. These are things that happen in office break rooms, in family group chats, in church lobbies after the service ends. They are the sins of Tuesday afternoon, and God says he hates them.
The One Expected Item
Murder is on the list. “Hands that shed innocent blood” sits right in the middle, and it belongs there. It is the one item that sounds like what most people imagine when they hear the phrase “things God hates.” Violent, visible, final.
But its presence makes everything around it stranger. If murder is the only heavy-hitter, what does that say about the six sins keeping it company? God placed pride and lying and gossip on the same list as murder, and he named pride first. The passage treats a lying tongue and a scheming heart with the same seriousness as bloodshed, and that is either the most uncomfortable sentence in Proverbs or the most clarifying one, depending on how honest you are willing to be about your last conversation.
What Isn’t There
Here is where the passage gets truly strange. Think about the sins that dominate public religious debate. Adultery. Sexual immorality. Idolatry. Drunkenness. These are the sins that get quoted on signs, argued about on cable news, preached about in the loudest voices. If you asked most Americans to guess what God hates, these would fill the list before anyone mentioned gossip.
They are nowhere in Proverbs 6. The passage where God itemizes what he hates contains zero of the sins most commonly cited in his name. Every item on this list is about how a person treats the people around them. The eyes that look down on someone, the tongue that deceives and the heart that plots behind it. Feet quick to chase harm. A witness who lies under oath, and the one who tears a community apart over something that could have been carried quietly.
That silence in the text is louder than anything written on it. Solomon had the full range of human sin available to him. He chose these seven. Or, if you take the passage as divinely inspired, God chose them. Either way, the selection reveals a priority that much of modern religious conversation has drifted far from.
What God Watches
I think about that unmarked page in the commentary sometimes. Someone read Proverbs carefully enough to highlight nearly every chapter and still passed over the verses where God names what he hates. It is easy to understand why. The list is too close. Adultery is something you can preach against from a safe distance. Pride is the mirror on the wall, and most of us would rather keep walking.
The God of Proverbs 6 pays attention to the things we do when we think no one is keeping score. The look we give. The half-truth we tell. The conflict we feed because it costs us nothing and entertains us for an afternoon. These are the things that made his list, and the absence of everything else tells a story about what he values that most of us have never stopped long enough to hear.
I have sat across from people who could name every large thing they had done wrong and never once mention the small ones. The half-truth at work. The look they gave their sister-in-law at Thanksgiving. The story they repeated about someone at church, knowing it would land exactly where it would do the most damage. Those never made anyone’s list. If you are reading this after a conversation you keep replaying on the drive home, one where you were the one with the look or the careless words, you are not the only person who has searched for something to help them see that clearly. These pages exist because readers choose to keep them here for whoever needs them next.
Maybe the most dangerous sins are the ones small enough to commit before lunch and forget by dinner.
