Today Is the Day the Lord Has Made: Psalm 118:24
The verse is Psalm 118:24: "This is the day that the LORD has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it." Most people meet it as a cheerful line about a new morning. In the psalm, "the day" is not any day at all. It is the day God rescued someone, and what you rejoice in is the rescue.
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The verse in two translations
King James Version
This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
Berean Standard Bible
This is the day that the LORD has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.
These two barely differ. "Which the LORD hath made" against "that the LORD has made" is a three-hundred-year gap in English, not a difference in meaning. The KJV wording is the one you know because it was the English Bible for most of that period, and because the hymn writers, choir directors and Sunday school teachers who set the line to music were all setting the King James words.
One thing worth noticing: plenty of people recite it as "let us rejoice and be glad in it." That is the ESV, NKJV and NIV. The KJV and BSB have "we will rejoice." The Hebrew form supports either, so nobody is misquoting.
The interesting split is not KJV against BSB. It is what happens when translators stop rendering the Hebrew word by word. The New English Bible has the day on which the LORD has acted. The Good News Translation calls it the day of the LORD's victory. The NIV opens with the LORD having done it this very day. All three are reading the Hebrew verb as acted rather than manufactured. God did not build this day like a carpenter. God did something on it.
That single decision is the whole argument of this article, compressed into a phrase.
What Psalm 118 is actually about
Read the psalm from the top and verse 24 stops floating.
Somebody is in serious trouble. Verses 5 to 13 describe being surrounded, pushed hard, close to falling. Nations swarm around him like bees. He calls out. He is answered and set free. By verse 17 he is saying he will not die but live, and by verse 18 that God disciplined him severely but did not hand him over to death.
Then the scene changes. He arrives at the temple, asks for the gates of righteousness to be opened, walks through, and gives thanks. This is a psalm with movement in it. It is not a meditation. It is somebody who nearly died walking up a hill to say thank you in public.
At verse 22 comes the image everything turns on:
The stone which the builders refused is become the head stone of the corner. This is the LORD'S doing; it is marvellous in our eyes. (Psalm 118:22-23, KJV)
A stone the professionals threw on the reject pile has ended up holding the building together. That reversal is the point of the psalm in one picture. The rejected one has been vindicated, and everyone can see that God did it.
Verse 24 is the next line. "The day" has something in front of it. That is the part the mug version loses. The psalmist is not gesturing at the calendar. He is pointing at what just happened.
Which day exactly? Serious interpreters read it three ways. Some take it as the day of the rescue itself, the day God acted. Some take it as the feast day appointed to remember the rescue, since Psalm 118 was used as festival liturgy and the celebration made the day present again for the worshipers. Christian readers going back to the early centuries take it further and read it as the day God acted in Christ.
Those readings disagree about which day. They agree completely about what kind of thing "the day" is. It is a particular day, with something in it. Not the generic gift of another twenty-four hours.
Worth saying plainly: nobody knows who wrote Psalm 118 or when. The psalm carries no name at the top. Jewish tradition and older Christian commentary attribute it to David. Most modern scholarship reads it as a communal liturgy and dates it anywhere from the late monarchy to after the Second Temple was rebuilt. If you see a page telling you confidently that David wrote it, that page is stating a tradition as a fact.
A familiar verse turning out to mean something other than its popular use is not unusual. The same thing happens with Paul's line about dying daily, which almost everyone reads as a devotional instruction and which almost certainly is not one.
Where the New Testament picks it up
Psalm 118 is one of the most heavily quoted passages in the New Testament, and the quoting clusters around the verses on either side of 24.
The cornerstone. Jesus finishes the parable of the tenants, in which a landowner's son is killed by the men renting his vineyard, and then quotes verses 22 to 23 at the chief priests. It is in Matthew 21:42, Mark 12:10-11 and Luke 20:17. He is telling the builders that they are the builders. Peter uses the same verse twice, once standing in front of the council that had just tried Jesus (Acts 4:11) and once in writing (1 Peter 2:7). The rejected stone reading of Psalm 118 was not a later Christian invention. It goes back to the earliest preaching there is a record of.
Hosanna. At the triumphal entry the crowds shout verses 25 and 26. It appears in all four Gospels: Matthew 21:9, Mark 11:9-10, Luke 19:38 and John 12:13. Most people assume "Hosanna" is a shout of praise. It is not. It is a transliteration of the Hebrew at the start of verse 25, which means save now, we pray. The crowd was quoting the line immediately after verse 24, and the line they quoted was a request for rescue.
The Hallel. Psalm 118 closes a group of six psalms, 113 to 118, known as the Egyptian Hallel, sung at the major Jewish festivals. Mishnah Pesachim 10 describes the Passover meal with the Hallel split around it: 113 and 114 earlier, then 115 to 118 over the fourth cup, at the end. Matthew 26:30 and Mark 14:26 both record that after the meal Jesus and the disciples sang a hymn and went out to the Mount of Olives.
Put those together and Psalm 118 was very likely the last thing Jesus sang before Gethsemane.
Three honest qualifications, because this detail gets overstated everywhere. The Gospels do not name the hymn. The Mishnah was written down around AD 200, so applying its description of the seder to a meal a hundred and seventy years earlier is a reasonable reconstruction rather than a record. And there is a long-running debate about whether the Last Supper was a Passover meal at all, since John's timeline does not match the other three. It is a strong inference. It is not a stated fact, and you should not repeat it as one.
If the cornerstone material interests you, it overlaps with the shortest summary of the Christian claim anywhere in Scripture.
So can you still say it on a Tuesday morning?
Yes. Nothing here takes the verse off you.
What the ordinary use gets right is real. God did make the day. Time is his, mornings are a gift rather than an entitlement, and gratitude on waking is a good instinct with plenty of Scripture behind it. Applying a verse beyond its first situation is normal reading, not abuse of the text.
What it misses is the object. The psalm rejoices about something. Cut the sentence loose from verses 22 and 23 and "rejoice and be glad" becomes an instruction with nothing attached to it, which is why it so often lands as pressure. Be positive. Cheer up. It is a beautiful day, so act like it.
The psalm never asks that. It asks you to be glad about a rescue, which is a different thing entirely, and available to you on a day that is going badly. The order matters too. Rejoicing in Psalm 118 follows the deliverance. It does not produce it. Saying the words over your coffee will not make the Tuesday go better, and the psalm never suggested it would.
So the ordinary use survives. It just gets a spine. You are not talking yourself into a good mood about the weather. You are saying that something happened, once, that outranks how today is going.
Context does that to a verse more often than not. It rarely takes anything away. It usually hands you something heavier to stand on.
If you want more in this vein, we have a set of verses about starting over for the days when the point really is a fresh beginning.
What to do with it
Read the whole psalm once, all twenty-nine verses. It takes two minutes and it is the single thing that will change how the verse sounds to you.
Read verses 22 to 26 as one block rather than picking out 24. That is the unit the New Testament writers were working with.
Next time you use the line in the morning, finish the sentence. Say what you are glad about. If nothing comes, that is worth noticing, and the psalm is not asking you to fake it.
Read it at Easter, when it turns up in the readings across most traditions. The Latin of verse 24, Haec dies quam fecit Dominus, has been sung on Easter morning for well over a thousand years, which tells you how the church has heard it.
And read Matthew 21:42 alongside it once. Seeing Jesus quote the verse two lines above yours reframes the whole passage faster than any commentary will.
Questions people ask
What does "this is the day the Lord has made" mean?
It means a particular day, not every day. In Psalm 118 it refers to the day God rescued the psalmist and vindicated him, described in the verses just before it. Some readers take it as the day of the rescue, others as the festival day appointed to remember it.
Who wrote Psalm 118?
Nobody knows. The psalm has no heading naming an author. Jewish tradition and older Christian commentators attributed it to David. Most modern scholars read it as a communal temple liturgy and place it anywhere from the late monarchy to the period after the Second Temple was rebuilt.
Is Psalm 118:24 about Easter?
Not originally. It was written centuries before, and the day it celebrates is an Old Testament deliverance. Christians have read it as pointing to the resurrection since the earliest centuries, partly because Jesus quotes verses 22 to 23 about himself, and it remains a standard Easter reading.
What does "rejoice and be glad in it" mean?
It means celebrate what God did on that day. The rejoicing has an object, and the object is the rescue described in the psalm. It is not an instruction to feel positive, and it is not a technique for improving how your day goes.
Is it wrong to use Psalm 118:24 as a morning verse?
No. God did make the day, and applying the verse to an ordinary morning is fair. It just works better when you know what the psalm is celebrating, because then you are being glad about something that already happened rather than talking yourself into optimism.
What is Psalm 118:24 in the KJV?
"This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it." That is the wording most English speakers know. Modern translations mostly keep the shape but some render it as the day the LORD has acted, which is closer to the sense of the Hebrew verb.
One last thing
This is one of the most quoted verses in the Bible, and it is on more mugs and wall prints than almost anything else in the Psalms. Most of the people who love it have never been told what it is actually celebrating, which is a shame, because the real thing is bigger than the version on the mug.
Ave sends you one verse a day and explains it in plain English when you tap. If this is the kind of thing you want to find out about the verses you already know, that is what it is for.