Most everyone of a certain age and era who grew up in the church is familiar with an exercise, a contest really, called a Sword Drill. A teacher named a book in the Bible, then a chapter, then a verse, and the race was on. Find it first, and you win.
The most basic thing any successful sword-driller knows is that the book of Psalms is found right at the center of our Scripture. If you open the Bible to the middle with any sort of precision, you’ll be looking down at one of the Psalms. Of course it helps that there are 150 of them. They take up a good chunk of real estate.
And while everyone agrees that the Psalms are at the center of the Bible, people who perhaps have too much time on their hands, still argue about the verse that occupies the exact middle point of God’s Word.
If you focus on the number of chapters in the Bible, you’ll find one answer. If you focus on the total number of verses in the Bible, you’ll find another. If you focus on word count, you’ll never find the answer because, given the many translations, the Bible has no definitive word count.
Some say Psalm 118:8 occupies that mysterious middle spot. They count up a total of 1,189 chapters in the Bible. They then reason that if you remove Psalm 118, that leaves 1,188 chapters with 594 positioned before Psalm 118 and exactly 594 positioned after Psalm 118. Many of these number-crunching Bible enthusiasts then latch onto this number, this 1,188 figure, as it points them to Psalm 118:8, which offers us this particular verse at what they call the very center of the Bible:
It is better to trust in the Lord than to put confidence in man.
It’s an important thought. Central, you might say, to the Bible. Place your trust in the Lord, not mere human beings. God, they posit, must have wanted to highlight this notion as the core truth of His Word given its placement at, what they say, is the very center of Scripture.
However, the thrill of how the math works out begins to diminish when we recall that the Bible had no chapter designations until an English cardinal named Stephen Langton, who later became Archbishop of Canterbury, dropped them into the text in the 13th century. While this does nothing to diminish the crucial message of the verse, truth be told, Psalm 118:8 really isn’t at the mathematical center of the Bible.
Others looking for the exact center of Scripture instead point to the fact that there are a total of 31,102 verses in the Bible. Since that’s an even number, they locate the precise midpoint of Scripture as the blank space found just after Psalm 103:1, which reads "Bless the Lord, O my soul and all that is within me, bless His holy name,” and just before Psalm 103:2, which reads “Bless the Lord, O my soul, and forget not all His benefits.”
However, this formula also relies on the Bible being divided up into discrete verses, and as we’ve already seen with the chapters, the verse designations weren’t in the original texts either. They weren’t separated as they are now until Robert Estienne, a French print shop owner, decided to break up the text in this way when he published a New Testament in Greek in the 16th century.
Regardless, it’s intriguing to consider that the very center of the inspired Word of God is a brief silence between two magnificent expressions of praise. There’s something sublime about that little space, a mere catching of the breath between two short-but-beautiful declarative sentences that seek to bless and praise God.
While searching for hidden secrets that might lie at the exact “geographical” center of the Bible is probably not the greatest way to determine the grand theme of God’s Word, still there is something fitting and satisfying in combining these two theories, these two approaches, as they provide us with a two-pronged message that’s both at the heart of the Psalms and at the center of all Scripture. It’s not a bad mantra to whisper to yourself throughout the day.
Praise Him. (Breathe). Trust Him. (Breathe). Bless Him. (Breathe).
If we were all participating in a Sword Drill to find the location of where this truth and divine instruction on how we might live appears in the Bible, the contest would basically be over before it started—it’s really one that appears on every page in one form or another. Open your Bible today and see.
