Psalms 118:24
What does Psalms 118:24 mean?
This is the day that Yahweh has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it!
The short answer
Psalm 118:24 makes two claims, and both matter. The first is about God: "This is the day that Yahweh has made." The day you are living right now — this ordinary Tuesday or difficult Thursday — did not simply happen. It was made. Time itself, in the psalmist's view, is not a neutral container we fill with tasks; it is a crafted thing, given by God with intention behind it. The sun rising and setting is not just physics but design.
The second claim is a response: "We will rejoice and be glad in it!" Notice the small words at the end — *in it*. The rejoicing is not general good cheer or a vague optimism about life. It is located in this particular day, the one in front of you. The verse does not say we will rejoice about the past or feel hopeful about tomorrow. It plants gladness firmly in the present.
That's what makes Psalms 118:24 more demanding than it looks on a coffee mug. It is easy to treat the line as a sunny slogan, quoted when the weather is nice and the schedule is light. But the psalm frames rejoicing as a decision — "we will" — made in response to what God has already done. The gladness follows the fact. Because God made the day, joy in it becomes reasonable, even on days that feel heavy or rushed.
Read this way, the verse is less a mood and more a discipline: a daily reorientation that begins by acknowledging whose day this is, and then chooses to receive it rather than merely survive it. That shift — from sentiment to practice — is where the verse's real power lives, and it is why generations of believers have made it their first words of the morning.
What scholars say
James C. Howell imagines what would change if this verse were the first thing spoken when the morning alarm sounds, grounding its joy in the fact that God made the day and built a divine rhythm into it. Martin Thielen then shows how the verse — so often reduced to a poster caption — captures a point where Scripture and the science of life satisfaction agree: happiness is found by focusing on the present moment.
“T he Christian life would be immeasurably enriched if, when the alarm clock tolls in the morning, you could hit the off button, swivel your feet to the floor, stand up, take a good breath, and say, "This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it" — and perhaps reiterate this most faithful thought throughout the day. A day can feel onerous, or perhaps like a leaky sieve, minutes slipping away, too much to do, rushing. But God made the day. The sun comes up and sets because God planned it; there is a divine rhythm to life.”
“Once again, when it comes to finding life satisfaction, science and Scripture concur. The Bible clearly teaches us to focus on the present moment. Many examples could be given. For example, during my teenage years my youth group went to a pizza joint every Sunday night after church. On the wall of the pizza parlor hung a huge poster of a child sitting in a high chair. The child, grinning from ear to ear, had just poured a big bowl of spaghetti over his head. The caption said, “This is the day that the Lord has made; let us rejoice and be glad in it” (Ps. 118:24).”
What it means for you
Try letting this verse be the first complete sentence of your day. Before the phone, before the to-do list, say it — not as a performance of cheerfulness, but as a statement of fact: God made this day, and you can choose to be glad in it. Then return to it when the day starts to feel like it is slipping through your fingers.
The practice also trains attention. Rejoicing *in it* means resisting the pull toward regret about yesterday and anxiety about tomorrow. The present moment is the only day you have actually been given, and this verse teaches you to receive it as a gift rather than an obstacle.
Psalms 118 in context
Psalm 118 is a song of thanksgiving, likely sung in procession toward the temple. Its refrain — that Yahweh's loving kindness endures forever — opens and closes the psalm, framing everything between. The psalmist recounts being surrounded by enemies, pushed hard, and nearly falling, yet delivered by God. Verse 22, about the stone the builders rejected becoming the cornerstone, sits just before our verse and is quoted often in the New Testament. Verse 24, then, is not naive cheerfulness; it is the joy of someone who has come through real trouble and now recognizes the day of deliverance as God's own doing.