Context for What God has Done,Otto Scott

I have read OttoScotts The Great Chrisitan Revolution and learned so much! Its been a year or so. But sometimes as you are learning about new things, that your brain has never dealt with, you will lose the big picture or catch the big pic and miss the details. On this book I notice the details and missed the big view as became apparent when I listened to Scott give two talks about this subject.

Man always moves in terms of his faith, what he believes, whether it is true or not.

On this mp3 from sermon audio Otto Scott gives talks on The great Christian revolution part one. Part one works with humanity at the time of Christ and the first few hundred years. He goes into how big a part of all human understanding, all around the globe, that human sacrifice to the gods was a basic part of life. That there was no belief that Gods cared about or loved man. The relationship was fear based. How slavery was universally accepted and practiced. Human life had no intrinsic value. Our modern humanistic historians always try to hide so much of what humanity was like before Christ. They refuse to admit that Christianity was THE catalyst that changed everything.

Now I had already pointed this out on my last email,The enemy is always trying to take what God has done and deflect away what should be praises to God and instead pass things off as just happenstance, or inevitable progress. Or maybe it has always been that way? We take it for granted. We no longer can remember what life was like, or said another way, what was it that got turned so upside down. What did humanity look like when Jesus walked among us?

Scott shows how it seemed impossible, and that it was without the new testament even written yet, that God spread his Good News. This news assaulted every culture of the day at its foundation.

When someone gives a 40minute talk about a book they must condense what they say. They will say in a sentence what they might spend pages on in a book. So it was on my second listen to this mp3 that God opened my eyes to see how absolutely radical, even staggering, was the good news during that time. Revoluntionary is right.

There is so much we take for granted about life because we have lived our whole lives, maybe not as believers , or even in Christian homes but we none the less have no clue of how dark life would be like this …. that human sacrifice to the gods was a basic part of life. That there was no belief that Gods cared about or loved man. The relationship was fear based. How slavery was universally accepted and practiced. Human life had no intrinsic value.

This mp3 will give you so much more to work with your family on what the good news was and is. It magnifies God.

The First half is on how endemic human sacrifice and slavery were. The second half of this talk is where he tries to show how sharp the contrast was between this new Faith and the existing world view of life.