Proverbs 13:5

Your honor and success depend on honesty and truth. A good man hates lying. He despises exaggerations or misrepresentations. No cost or incentive can get him to lie. Truth is a rare virtue; God and men will promote and reward a faithful and honest man.

Wicked men lie and slander easily. They are despicable, disgusting, and repulsive; they are nauseous, as the word loathsome indicates. They reflect their god, who has lied from the beginning. They will come to shame, for the LORD will expose and punish them.

Your future prosperity depends on truthfulness, no matter what others say, do, or appear to get away with (Pr 12:19). Honesty determines whether you are an abomination to God or His delight – and this will make an unbelievable difference in your life (Pr 12:22).

If you see a chance to get ahead by lying, it is a vain illusion, and you are playing with death itself (Pr 21:6; 19:9). A faithful man will not lie (Pr 14:5), and he will receive a faithful man’s reward (Pr 28:20). An honest poor man is better than a rich liar (Pr 19:22).

Integrity is a wonderful thing. God will bless the man with it, and men will promote him, for they can trust him in any situation or under any circumstances. Such a man never has to play word games, for he deals only in truth; he never has to lie again to cover a lie.

God hates a lying tongue (Pr 6:16-19), and so did David (Ps 119:163). He strictly threw all liars and slanderers out of his house (Ps 101:4-8). You should take as strong a stand against lying as he did, if you want to be like him (Pr 12:19).

You inherited lying from Adam, and you must put it off (Col 3:9; Eph 4:25). In Israel, God commanded His people to not lie (Lev 19:11), and it is still against sound doctrine (I Tim 1:10). No liars are in heaven; they are all in the Lake of Fire (Rev 21:8,27).

Parents must teach children that lying, exaggerating, misrepresenting, slandering, or falsely accusing are horrible sins. Other sins can be covered by repentance, restitution, and reformation, but lying is of a different nature. It destroys trust, and rightly so. Every event in a child’s life involving lying should be dealt with clearly, soberly, and severely.

The wicked are despicable, repulsive, odious, hateful, and shocking, as the unusual word loathsome means. When you loathe something, you abhor it (Zech 11:8). God and the righteous loath, hate, and abhor the wicked for their lies and perverse disregard for truth.

Lies are a symptom of carnal Christianity today, when men would be trucebreakers, false accusers, traitors, deceived, deceiving, and preferring fables to truth (II Tim 3:1 – 4:4). It is a shame those who claim Christ out of one side of their mouths will lie with the other.

God’s true saints hate the lying hypocrisy of false religion (I Tim 4:1-3); they count all men liars, and trust only the God of truth (Rom 3:4; Acts 17:11; I Thess 5:21). They hate the great whore and her daughters, who prostitute Christianity with lies (Rev 17:1-6).

But wicked liars will be exposed. God will reveal their false handshakes and vain words (Ps 144:8,11). God loves to manifest sinners for judgment and to honor His saints (Mal 3:17-18). He killed Ananias and Sapphira dead before the church for lying (Acts 5:1-11).

Jesus Christ is the truth (Jn 14:6), the word of truth (Jas 1:18), the faithful witness (Rev 1:5), true (Rev 3:7), the faithful and true witness (Rev 3:14), and called Faithful and True (Rev 19:11). If you are a new creature in Him, you will also hate lying and love truth.