What Is the Difference Between God and Lord in the Bible?

Both words name the same God, but they are different words. “God” is a title, in Hebrew Elohim. “Lord” in ordinary type is another title, Adonai, “my Lord.” When an English Bible prints LORD in capital letters, it stands for God’s own name, the four Hebrew letters YHWH, which Jewish readers do not say aloud.

They meet in the sentence Israel was told to talk of “when thou sittest in thine house, and when thou walkest by the way” (Deuteronomy 6:7): “Hear, O Israel: The LORD our God is one LORD” (Deuteronomy 6:4). There the name and the title stand side by side, and the verse insists they belong to one. When a scribe asked Jesus which commandment came first, he answered with these same words (Mark 12:29). The two words never meant two Gods. With them Scripture lets us speak of the One who is above everything and who has told us his name.

The word “God” tells us what he is, and the Bible’s first sentence uses it: “In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth” (Genesis 1:1). The Hebrew word there is Elohim, which comes about 2,570 times in the Old Testament by the count of the Brown-Driver-Briggs lexicon. It is plural in form, and the Jewish Encyclopedia notes that it is “commonly construed with a singular verb or adjective” when it names the God of Israel. It can also mean the gods of the nations, and the context tells us which is meant. Paul knew that use well: “though there be that are called gods, whether in heaven or in earth, (as there be gods many, and lords many,)” (1 Corinthians 8:5). The New Testament’s word is the Greek Theos, which appears 1,327 times.

So when we ask who made us, and to whom we must answer, “God” is the word we reach for. It is the word for the Creator, the Most High, the one before whom there is no other.

“Lord” is a word for a master, and the Bible uses it of people too. Sarah, laughing at the promise of a son, says of Abraham, “my lord being old also” (Genesis 18:12), and Peter remembers her “calling him lord” (1 Peter 3:6). Her Hebrew word is adoni, “my lord,” from adon, the ordinary word for a king, a master or a husband. A special form of it, Adonai, “my Lord,” is kept in Scripture for God alone, and it became Israel’s title for him.

The Greek Kyrios works the same way. It can be as plain as “sir”: the Samaritan woman at the well says it to a tired stranger, “Sir, thou hast nothing to draw with, and the well is deep” (John 4:11). It can also be the highest word a person can say. One psalm puts both senses in a single line: “O LORD, our Lord, how excellent is thy name in all the earth!” (Psalm 8:1). The first is God’s name, and the second is the worshipper bowing and saying, You are our Master. So where “God” tells us what he is, “Lord” tells us where we stand, under his care and his command. The title has a page of its own in what Adonai means.

The capitals are there because the word stands for a name. At the burning bush God told Moses, “I Am That I Am,” and then gave the four letters of his name, adding, “this is my name for ever, and this is my memorial unto all generations” (Exodus 3:14–15). The Jewish Encyclopedia counts 6,823 uses of the name in the Old Testament, more than any other name for God.

Out of reverence, Jewish readers kept the name unspoken. By the third century before Christ, Lavinia Cohn-Sherbok writes in her introduction to Judaism, the letters “were regarded as so sacred that they were never articulated,” and the reader said Adonai in their place. Over time even Adonai felt too holy for ordinary speech, and “today most Orthodox Jews use [the term] HaShem, which simply means ‘the Name.’” Christian translators have kept the custom, and the translators of the English Standard Version explain that, “As is common among English translations today,” they render YHWH “by the word LORD (printed in small capitals).” The older form Jehovah, which the King James Version prints in Exodus 6:3, joins the letters of the name to the vowels of Adonai.

Christians keep the same reverence. In 2008 the Vatican’s office for worship directed that in Catholic liturgy “the name of God in the form of the tetragrammaton YHWH is neither to be used or pronounced,” and it is read as “Lord.” Jehovah’s Witnesses, on the other hand, call God by the name. “Jehovah is a rendering of God’s name in English that has been used for centuries,” they write, and God “honors his worshippers by inviting them to address him by his personal name.” How the name sounded, what it means and where Jehovah came from are told in the names of God and their meanings.

What is the difference between “LORD God” and “Lord GOD”?

The capitals show which Hebrew word is behind each English one. “The LORD God” is YHWH Elohim, the name with the title “God,” as when Genesis tells of “the day that the LORD God made the earth and the heavens” (Genesis 2:4). “Lord GOD” is Adonai YHWH, and there English translators print the name as GOD, in small capitals. The ESV’s translators describe it this way: when Adonai “appears together with YHWH,” the two “are rendered together as ‘the Lord [in lowercase] GOD [in small capitals].’” Abram uses it when he pleads with God for a child: “Lord GOD, what wilt thou give me, seeing I go childless” (Genesis 15:2).

One famous verse would be hard to follow without the capitals. “The LORD said unto my Lord, Sit thou at my right hand, until I make thine enemies thy footstool” (Psalm 110:1). YHWH speaks, and the one he speaks to is someone David calls “my Lord.” Jesus asked the Pharisees about that verse: “If David then call him Lord, how is he his son?” (Matthew 22:45). The rest of the New Testament keeps coming back to that question.

Every Bible has to decide what to print for the name, and this is how these Bibles print Deuteronomy 6:4, the verse Jesus called the first commandment.

Language and Bible	Deuteronomy 6:4	The name YHWH is printed
English, King James Version	The LORD our God is one LORD	LORD
French, Louis Segond 1910	l’Éternel, notre Dieu, est le seul Éternel	l’Éternel, “the Eternal”
Spanish, Reina-Valera 1960	Jehová nuestro Dios, Jehová uno es	Jehová
German, Luther 1545	der HERR, unser Gott, ist ein einiger HERR	HERR, “Lord”
Italian, Nuova Riveduta 2006	il SIGNORE, il nostro Dio, è l’unico SIGNORE	SIGNORE, “Lord”
Russian, Synodal	Господь, Бог наш, Господь един есть	Господь, “Lord”
Japanese, the WordProject text	われわれの神、主は唯一の主である	主 (shu), “Lord”

In each of these Bibles the word for God is the ordinary one: Dieu, Dios, Gott, Dio, Бог, 神 (kami). Where they differ is the name. Readers of the Segond hear God’s name as “the Eternal,” readers of the Reina-Valera as Jehová, and the others as “Lord,” often in capitals as in English. The Russian “Господь Бог” of Genesis 2:4 and the Japanese 主なる神 are the same pair as the English “LORD God”: the name, then the title.

In the Old Testament the LORD is God, with no gap between them. “I am the LORD thy God,” the Ten Commandments begin (Exodus 20:2), and Isaiah hears God say, “Look unto me, and be ye saved, all the ends of the earth: for I am God, and there is none else” (Isaiah 45:22).

In the New Testament the words begin to name the Father and the Son. Paul writes, “But to us there is but one God, the Father, of whom are all things, and we in him; and one Lord Jesus Christ, by whom are all things, and we by him” (1 Corinthians 8:6). The verse uses the Shema’s two words, God for the Father and Lord for Jesus, and it still says “one.” That is why Christians speak of the Holy Trinity: one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit. Paul can call the Spirit “Lord” as well: “Now the Lord is that Spirit: and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is liberty” (2 Corinthians 3:17).

The Catechism of the Catholic Church explains how that step was taken. The Greek Old Testament rendered YHWH as Kyrios, “Lord,” and so “the New Testament uses this full sense of the title ‘Lord’ both for the Father and – what is new – for Jesus, who is thereby recognized as God Himself.”

Jehovah’s Witnesses read these verses differently and teach that Jesus is not God Almighty: “Jesus never claimed to be on the same level as Almighty God,” they write, pointing to his words in John 14:28, “The Father is greater than I am.”

We call Jesus Lord because the apostles gave him the word that stood for God’s name. Isaiah heard God swear “That unto me every knee shall bow, every tongue shall swear” (Isaiah 45:23). Paul takes up the same picture for Jesus: “That at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, of things in heaven, and things in earth, and things under the earth; And that every tongue should confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Philippians 2:10–11).

He does it again in Romans. “If thou shalt confess with thy mouth the Lord Jesus, and shalt believe in thine heart that God hath raised him from the dead, thou shalt be saved,” he writes, and a few lines on he quotes the prophet Joel: “For whosoever shall call upon the name of the Lord shall be saved” (Romans 10:9, 13). In Joel the name in that sentence is YHWH (Joel 2:32). Peter preached the same at Pentecost: “God hath made the same Jesus, whom ye have crucified, both Lord and Christ” (Acts 2:36).

Christian prayer often closes “through Christ our Lord,” and Paul says the confession itself is the Spirit’s gift: “no man can say that Jesus is the Lord, but by the Holy Ghost” (1 Corinthians 12:3). An angel said it to shepherds in the fields near Bethlehem on the night he was born: “For unto you is born this day in the city of David a Saviour, which is Christ the Lord” (Luke 2:11).

A week later Thomas, who had refused to believe, was shown the wounds in Jesus’ hands and side, and he answered with both words at once: “My Lord and my God” (John 20:28).

---

• Names of God in the Bible and Their Meanings: Yahweh, Elohim, Adonai, El Shaddai
• What Does Yahweh Mean?
• What Does “Adonai” Mean?
• What’s the Meaning of Elohim in the Bible?
• How Often Is “Lord” Used in the Bible?
• God Vs. Jesus Christ: How Are They Different?