Trinity, is the son of GOD, GOD himself/itself?
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In English Old Testament translations we usually use one of the following forms to refer to God (the following is the ESV convention):
- all caps "LORD" (to signify the Hebrew yhwh, but spoken adonay / "Lord" out of respect)
- initial cap "God" (Hebrew elohim), or
- "Lord GOD" (Hebrew adonay yhwh)
but not all caps "GOD" on its own. For the rest of the answer I am going to assume that you mean "GOD" to mean "LORD".
Here are the translation conventions of the most common English Bibles:
- English Standard Version: ESV Preface "Translation of Specialized Terms"
- New Living Translation: NLT Preface "The Rendering of Divine Names"
- New International Version: NIV Preface
- New American Standard Bible: NASB Preface "Principles of Translation - THE PROPER NAME OF GOD IN THE OLD TESTAMENT"
- New Revised Standard Version: NRSV Preface
A rough guidance for the reader is that, by convention, the forms that include the Hebrew yhwh (such as "LORD" or "Lord GOD") refer to the personal name of God while the forms without (such as "God") refer to a divine being. See my answer to another question for more details.
This distinction is VERY important and you will find how both forms are mixed in a single Bible verse to make a point, such as Ps 50:1 or Isa 45:5-6 when the Israelites wanted to distinguish her God from another nation's God.
Imagine you are an Israelite in the time after David where every nation around you worship a God, but a different God than the one you are worshiping. How do you, in a poem, say that YOUR God is the true, all powerful God who rules over everyone (not just your nation)? So you say as Ps 50:1 is saying:
"The LORD, the Mighty One, is God, and he has spoken; he has summoned all from where the sun rises to where it sets."
Or imagine in the time of Isaiah you wanted to say that Cyrus the Persian King was going to be commissioned by YOUR God to return you from exile and that it was NOT going to be Cyrus's God who would do that, but it was YOUR God who would empower Cyrus (see Isa 45:1-13):
1a This is what the LORD says to Cyrus, his anointed one, whose right hand he will empower.
...
4 “And why have I called you for this work? Why did I call you by name when you did not know me? It is for the sake of Jacob my servant, Israel my chosen one.
5 I am the LORD; there is no other God. I have equipped you for battle, though you don’t even know me,
6 so all the world from east to west will know there is no other God. I am the LORD, and there is no other.
7 I create the light and make the darkness. I send good times and bad times. I, the LORD, am the one who does these things.
...
In both examples you want to say that regardless of how another nation calls their God (be it Molech, Baal, Chemosh, Dagon, etc.), the other nation's people are ALSO subject to YOUR own God whose personal name is the LORD (yhwh).
Moving on to the New Testament era, the Jewish Christians believed Jesus to be sent by that same God whose personal name is the LORD (yhwh), but NOT sent by another God (by this time we had a different set of "gods", like Athena, Zeus, Apollo, Jupiter, etc.) But the early Jewish Christians not only believed that Jesus was sent by the LORD (yhwh), but that Jesus had the same ESSENCE as the LORD (yhwh) while remained distinct. Thus the convention changed to reflect this new revelation. They discontinued the usage of referring to the OT God using the personal name LORD (yhwh). Instead they use "God" to refer to God the Father and "Jesus" to refer to God the Son. Jesus himself refers to God as the "Father" many times. See wikipedia article "Names and titles of God in the New Testament" for complete technical details.
So one way to answer your question is to understand the historical development of the CONVENTION of how Israelites, then Jews, then Jewish Christians refer to their God. It would be mixing OT and NT conventions to say that "Jesus is LORD" (that's why you don't see that in English NT translation).
Instead, you see:
- "Jesus is Lord": meaning Jesus is your master and your king, or
- "Jesus is God": meaning Jesus has the attributes of the same supreme being that the LORD (yhwh) has in the OT, or
- "Jesus is God's Son": meaning that Jesus, in his divine identity within the Trinitarian Godhead, is the eternally begotten Son of God the Father
So to ask "is Jesus also LORD" is to muddy the convention. What do you mean by that question?
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