Often we tend to skip the accounts of family lines, for what can we learn from them? Yet, in this passage we find a great message.
To begin with, we read that Adam only died when he was nine hundred and thirty years old. In Genesis 2:17b we read that God said, ‘For when you eat from it (the forbidden fruit) you will certainly die.’ But Adam did not die! He lived on for many years after that.
And yet Adam died that fatal day. He died spiritually.
Before the fall of man, Adam was created in the likeness of God (5:1). He then was a trinity: spirit, soul and body. Due to the fall of man, Adam died spiritually and since then he was a two-unity: body and soul. This is also the modern scientific concept of human nature.
The first man (Adam) was thus created in the likeness of God (:1). After the fall of man, he had children, but it is emphasized here that these children were born ‘in his own likeness, in his own image’ (:3), and therefore no longer in the likeness of God.
Jesus Christ came to earth to spiritually revive the children of Adam, who were spiritually dead because of Adam: …’when the (spiritually) dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live’ (John 5:25). The fact that - when Jesus spoke about ‘the dead’ - He really meant ‘the spiritually dead’, becomes clear in another statement of Jesus: ‘Let the (spiritually) dead bury their own (physically) dead, but you go and proclaim the kingdom of God’ (Luke 9:60).
So for us this means that if we follow and obey Him, we too will experience the miracle of resurrection from the dead when we are born again from the Holy Spirit, through Jesus Christ our Lord!