God So Loved, He Gave is a genuine joy to read. It forcefully reminds readers–or, perhaps, informs them for the first time–that Christ’s saving work and its corresponding call to faith and, ultimately, self-sacrifice flows from, and so reveals, the fundamental character of the triune God as deeply loving and profoundly generous. In that process, the book foregrounds the purely unexpected nature, from a human perspective, of God’s gracious response to human sin, the giving of such a gift–namely, Himself–to recover that which was “lost” by virtue not of the Creator’s negligence, but of the creature’s own defiance.

Kelly M. Kapic with Justin Borger, God So Loved, He Gave: Entering the Moment of Divine Generosity. (Grand Rapids: Zondervan, 2010), 280 pp., $19.99

Kelly Kapic’s God So Loved, He Gave is a compelling presentation of the Christian Gospel with a persistent emphasis upon the magnitude of God’s generosity and the consequent enormity of God’s gifts. This emphasis finds expression in every stage of the unfolding Gospel drama depicted by the author. 

The book begins with a chapter on God’s gift of creation. Since God’s act of creation is entirely free, creation highlights the divine ownership of everything–not least human beings. The beauty and gratuity of God’s first gift (creation and creaturely being per se) reinforces the tragic nature of the fall, a reality explored in chapter two. The accent falls here upon the bondage to sin, self, and the Devil which resulted from the primal mutiny of God’s creatures. The tragedy of the fall, in turn, reinforces the unexpected and extravagant nature of those subsequent gifts–the Son, the Spirit, and the Kingdom–bestowed by God to recover his rebellious creatures. 

After noting (chapter three) prophecies and anticipations of these redemptive gifts in the time between the fall and Christ’s advent, Kapic turns his attention properly (chapter four) to the principal gift by which human redemption is secured–Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God. In the turn to redemption the stark difference between divine and human acts of giving becomes so apparent. Humans give gifts to celebrate life’s mile markers or accomplishments, or occasionally (for some of us more often than others) to make amends for misdeeds. By contrast, God “gives a gift, the Gift,” to–and in spite of–“his rebellious creation, defined by its resistance to him” (p. 69).  

Chapter five explores the reality of human faith as the foremost and appropriate response to this gift. Kapic helpfully distinguishes genuine faith from both intellectual assent and “paths of self-improvement” (p. 88), while highlighting the paradoxical nature of faith as both “something we do” and something God does in us, something which is “itself…a gift from God” (p. 89). Chapters six and eight flesh out the character of salvation with attention to God’s redemptive gifts of the Spirit and the Kingdom. Chapters seven and nine, corresponding to six and eight respectively, consider the experience of these further gifts on the part of believers: possessing the Spirit entails knowing oneself as God’s adopted child and bearing spiritual fruits; living in the semi-realized Kingdom entails becoming “witnesses and agents of his kingdom” (p. 133) and orienting our lives towards the Kingdom virtues of justice and righteousness.
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