For an Informed Love of God
Bill Mounce
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κύριος
κύριος means “Lord; master, sir.”
“If you confess with your mouth, ‘Jesus is κύριος,’ and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved” (Romans 10:9).
“κύριος, you have no bucket and the well is deep” (John 4:11).
Mounce's Expository Dictionary (abridged):
Noun: κύριος (kyrios), GK G3261 (S G2962), 717x. kyrios means “master, lord, sir” as well as “Lord.” In the secular sense, κύριος in the NT is translated as the “master” of a slave (Mt. 10:24–25; Eph. 6:5), “owner” (Mt. 15:27; Gal. 4:1), or “employer” (Lk. 16:3, 5). The husband is characterized as kyrios with respect to his wife (1 Pet. 3:6; cf. Gen. 18:12, where “master” is kyrios in the LXX). God is consistently depicted as kyrios, especially when the NT author is quoting an OT passage that uses kyrios for Yahweh (Rom. 4:8; 9:28–29; 10:16). The earliest Christian confession is that “Jesus is Lord.” The Roman emperor was called “king of kings” because he presided over the vassal kings of the empire, but how puny and conceited in light of the absolute sovereignty of the Lamb, the true Lord of lords. NT writers found their evidence for Jesus’ lordship in Ps. 110:1, the most quoted psalm in the NT (see Mt. 22:44; 26:64; Acts 2:34; Eph. 1:20; Heb. 1:3, 13).