Detesting The Dishonest

Multiple places in the Bible say that God hates people, with some of them targeting a particular kind of sinner.  Leviticus 20:23, after the chapter has condemned or prescribed punishments for actions like cursing one's parents, bestiality, and incest, states that God hates people who practice such things, as he did the pagans the Israelites lived around.  In other cases, it says God detests miscellaneous sins.  Proverbs 11:1 says that God hates dishonest scales, which are addressed in Deuteronomy 25:13-15 when it condemns the use of predatory or inaccurate weights and measures.  The following verse of Deuteronomy 25:16 says he hates the dishonest person.

God is said to hate those who practice deception, not just deceitfulness itself, something repeated later on in Psalm 5:6.  If it only said that he hates lying, it would not necessarily follow that the text is saying he hates all liars by default, though hating the people would necessitate hating their errors as well, for the latter are the entire basis of this divine loathing.  One necessitates the other and one does not.  In Deuteronomy 25:16, though, it specifically says that God despises the liars and not just their sins as distinguished from the people who practice them.  It is not just that they are said to be excluded from eternal life (Revelation 22:15, Romans 6:23), but that God harbors actual hatred for them.

If a worldview (the ideology itself as opposed to mental acceptance of the ideology), belief, deed, or intention is worthy of hatred, so would anyone who holds to such things unrepentantly also be worthy of hatred.  According to the Biblical worldview as the book puts it forth, not according to various traditions, some people do deserve to be despised.  The same Biblical deity who loves the world desperately to the point of offering mercy to every sinner who repents (John 3:16, Romans 5:8, 2 Peter 3:9) also abhors some people, and there is no contradiction in this, nor does the literal hatred Yahweh has for the unrepentant wicked ever relent as long as they exist (Malachi 3:6, James 1:17).  He is a deity of both love and hatred.

Also, to deserve hatred does not mean that one is obligated to hate everyone applicable, only that it is not immoral to have this disposition towards them and that they do deserve it.  Otherwise, to not hate certain people would itself be sinful, and there would be no room for mercy that is pursued out of, potentially, a lack of hatred.  See Luke 6:36, though there are many ideological or personal motivations behind why someone might opt to be merciful in a given case.  While using accurate weights and measures for business purposes is hardly the most truth-honoring thing a person can do, the way that the Bible says God hates the dishonest in spite of his mercy affirms how seriously it takes disregard for truth.

"Do not lie," Leviticus 19:11 says.  Lying in the case of criminal slander even deserves the same penalty as the allegedly committed sins (Deuteronomy 19:16-21).  Of course, without truth, there cannot be moral obligation, and without obligation there can be no sin, so metaphysical truth, which is ultimately grounded in the fixed truths of logical necessity and possibility that not even a deity could alter, would have to matter above all else for this to be the case, or else nothing could matter.  Detesting the dishonest is at its core born out of enormous devotion to truth by God or by humans.