God said to Adam, “In the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” How can you harmonize this with the record that “all the days that Adam lived were nine hundred and thirty years, and he died?”– `Gen. 2:17`; `Gen 5:5`.

St. Peter gives us the key to this question in his declaration, "One day with the Lord is as a thousand years" (`2 Pet. 3:8`). Father Adam began to die as soon as he was cut off from the privileges of the garden of Eden; for while he was living therein he had the Divine permission to freely eat of the trees of the garden–with a single exception– and he was sustained by their life-giving fruit; but after his disobedience he was thrust out into the unprepared earth, and Cherubim with a flaming sword kept the pathway to Eden that he might not return thither to partake further of its sustaining fruit, but should die, in harmony with the sentence. "In the day that thou eateth thereof, thou shalt surely die" (`Gen. 2:17`). The dying there began, and continued gradually for nine hundred and thirty years, until life was extinct–Adam was dead. This all took place within a thousand year day.