Verse explainer

What does Psalm 118:24 really mean?

Not a generic morning pep talk — it's a shout of deliverance on one specific day of rescue, and joy is the commanded response.

KJV

This is the day which the LORD hath made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

BSB

This is the day that the LORD has made; we will rejoice and be glad in it.

The plain meaning

Psalm 118 is a victory hymn, almost certainly tied to a concrete moment of national or communal rescue — the surrounding verses describe being surrounded by enemies, nearly falling, and then being saved (vv. 10–14). Verse 24 is the congregation's eruption of praise at the climax of that story. "This is the day" points backward to the event just described: the day the LORD acted. The joy commanded — "we will rejoice" — is not a mood suggestion but a vow of praise. In the broader flow of the psalm, the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone (v. 22) is the pivotal miracle, and verse 24 is the crowd's response to it. Early Christian readers heard this as pointing forward to resurrection; Jewish readers connected it to festivals of deliverance like Passover. Either way, the joy is anchored in something God did, not in the weather or the reader's feelings.

The common misreading

"This is the day the LORD has made" means every new day is a gift to be happy about. This reading isn't wrong exactly — it's just much smaller than what the text says. Psalm 118 is not a morning devotional about sunrises. It is a structured victory hymn that moves from desperate danger (vv. 10–13: 'all nations surrounded me') through rescue ('the LORD helped me,' v. 13) to the image of the rejected stone becoming the cornerstone (v. 22) — and then to verse 24. 'This is the day' is the crowd pointing back at that moment of deliverance, not gesturing at the calendar in general. The joy commanded is proportional to a specific act of salvation, not to the fact that morning came. Flattening it into a daily mood-lifter strips the psalm of its narrative spine and turns a shout of rescue into a greeting-card sentiment. The honest reading is harder and richer: real, named deliverance happened, and that is why joy is commanded.

What the commentators say

Charles Spurgeon19th c. · PD

Spurgeon reads 'this is the day' as pointing to a singular, God-appointed moment of salvation — not every sunrise in rotation, but the day of the LORD's decisive act. The rejoicing, he notes, is obligatory worship springing from gratitude for what God accomplished, not a sentiment the believer must manufacture on their own.

John Gill18th c. · PD

Gill connects the verse directly to v. 22–23 — the rejected stone made cornerstone — and sees it as the people's joyful acknowledgment that this reversal was entirely God's doing. He notes the verse fits the Gospel era especially: the day of Christ's resurrection being the great 'day the LORD made,' around which the Church's praise is permanently oriented.

Albert BarnesBarnes' Notes · PD

Barnes emphasizes that 'the day' is specific, not a floating generality. The psalm's narrative context — deliverance from enemies, the gate of righteousness, the cornerstone — all point to a fixed occasion of rescue. The joy called for is a response proportioned to the magnitude of what God actually did on that day.

The word behind it

יוֹם yom

'Day.' Hebrew yom can mean a literal day, an era, or a decisive appointed moment. Here the demonstrative 'this is the day' makes it specific and deictic — it points at something. The psalmist is not meditating on days in general; he is marking one day that stands out because of what the LORD did in it. That specificity is what most casual quotations of the verse erase.

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