By partaking of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, Adam and Eve were given the capacity to know good and evil.

My pastor, Richard Jordan, explains, “They knew what both human good and human evil were and, by the way, both of those were forbidden. God isn't interested any more in your human good than He is in your human evil. Now, we don't like to believe that. Your old sin nature has one side that goes toward human good and another side that goes toward human evil; a bent toward asceticism and a bent toward lasciviousness.

“And I’ve worked with people in rescue missions, and seen derelicts where booze, and drugs and gambling, had destroyed their whole lives—lost their families, everything, down to nothing—and I’ve watched those people be just as proud as they could be.”

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Ezekiel 16 is a long chapter and that tells you how God gave birth to the nation Israel when He brought them out of Egypt. Essentially, He raised them up from childhood and when they got to be of age, He married them.

Jordan says, “He entered into a contract with them—into a covenant companionship—and He literally married them, and they became His wife and He was their husband. And He calls that contract—that covenant of the law— a marriage contract, and He said, ‘I blessed you, and I took care of you, and I did everything a husband ought to do for you and what'd you do? Well, you ran off and played the harlot. You ran off and gave it all to your illigitimate lovers. You gave them credit for the all the stuff I gave you.’

“The Book of Hosea will break your heart when you read all that went on. He told Hosea, ‘Go, take unto thee a wife of whoredoms and children of whoredoms: for the land hath committed great whoredom, departing from the LORD.’

“So he went out and married this prostitute Gomer. The name ‘Gomer’ means fruitcake; land of fruits and nuts. And she was a prostitute, and God says, ‘Go out there and marry her and have a bunch of kids by her because that's going to be a picture of Israel and me.’

“You know, I’ve thought a lot about people who say they wish they could live in the days of the Old Testament prophets.

“Have you ever read some of the stuff He told Ezekiel to do? He said, ‘Go makes some hamburgers out of meta-muffins and stand on the corner. Go over here and take all your clothes off and stand out there and paint a picture on the wall.’ Ezekiel was a street preacher. Hosea didn't have it too good either. It's a picture.

“Finally, God says to Israel, ‘I'll just give you the bill of divorcement—you've left.’ And He divorces them and that's what Jeremiah 3 and 8 talk about. Then He says, ‘But I'll tell you what, I'm going to restore you.’ He tells Hosea, ‘I'm going to do something for you that you can't do in the natural realm—I'm gonna restore Israel back (and that's why you read all those passages about the ‘virgin daughter of Israel’) into a position of purity and remarry you.’

“And you know how He's going to do that? That's what the New Covenant's going to do. He's going to ‘cleanse them from all their iniquity and remember their sin no more.’ It doesn't say He's going to forgive their sin; it says He's going to forgive their iniquity. Iniquity is the idea of the crookedness and perverseness. It's the offensive nature of sin. It describes the offence; how offensive it is.

“He said, ‘I'll forgive even the great offense that you're sin is to my justice, and then I will remember your sins no more.’ You ever thought about that? How do you remember sins no more? I mean, what’d God do, get Alzheimers?

“How do you forget something? If I tell you do not think of green elephants, can you do that? That just puts it into your mind, right? But if I tell you, ‘I don't want you to think about green elephants; think about a red fire truck’. . . You see, the way you forget to think about something is to think about something else! That's how God forgets your sins.

The Apostle Paul uses this same terminology in Romans 4:7 with, “Blessed are they whose iniquities are forgiven, and whose sins are covered.”

“Notice he says the man's iniquities are forgiven?” says Jordan. “His sins are covered; they're hidden, and the Lord doesn't write them down to His account anymore. Why? Because that's the joy of a man who's been justified. When you're justified, you're declared righteous. God sees you in the righteousness of His Son so that when He looks at you, what does He think about? He thinks about Christ. Well, if He's thinking about Christ He's not thinking about that green elephant that you laid!”