Standing for Truth and Defending Your Freedom
Standing for Truth and Defending Your Freedom

The Man Who Divided Time in Half

by Dr. D. James Kennedy

Yale University’s Dr. Philip Schaff, who truly was an ornament to that school, wrote massive volumes on history and surveyed the entire course of human progress on this planet. Having done that from the beginning to modern times, he came to this conclusion:

The most momentous event in the history of this world was the coming and birth of Jesus Christ; and since that religion represents the highest and holiest and noblest aspiration of men, the introduction of the Christian faith has been the greatest boon mankind has ever known. It divides all of the history of the world very decisively into B.C. and A.D.

Schaff recognized that Jesus Christ was the only man great enough to divide time in half. Not only did Christ’s coming split history—into B.C. (Before Christ) and A.D. (Anno Domini, in the year of our Lord)—but it changed the world. There are some people who have changed various parts of the world, various segments of it, and some of those segments have never been the same since they practiced their art. However, Jesus Christ changed the whole world. He made all things new. Let’s look at some of the areas in our world forever changed by His influence.

  • Infanticide was once a common practice in the ancient pagan world. Children were cast out on to the mountainside to be consumed by wild beasts or strange people who took them for very perverted reasons. But it was Jesus’ Church upholding the Savior’s sacred view of life which said, “Bring the children to us,” and thus infanticide was eradicated by the touch of the Master’s hand.
  • Christ’s coming also elevated women in society. Women once considered nothing more than chattel, simply possessions, bought and sold, became the daughters of God and they were lifted onto a pedestal. That’s something you wouldn’t hear from the so-called women’s lib movement today, but it is true. Jesus Christ: He made all things new.
  • Because of Christ, schools for the masses—colleges and universities that had not existed before Him—came into existence. All the great universities that sprang up in the Middle Ages in Europe, were started by Christians for the purposes of Christ, and were part of the result of Jesus Christ’s Spirit working in the hearts of men.
  • Hospitals, which almost hardly existed at all before Christ, emerged to treat the infirm. Medicine flourished. Florence Nightingale felt the touch of Christ in her heart, and she went to the Crimean War and nursing was born as a glorious profession because it had been touched by the Master’s hand.
  • It was a Christian, William Wilberforce, who devoted his life to the abolition of slavery in England. And when slavery spread to the northern parts of America, it was the thundering pronouncements of the Word of God from the pulpits of American churches that finally destroyed it.

Christ’s influence can also be traced to science. Not only was the father of modern science, Francis Bacon, a Christian, but the scientific method and most of the branches of science—including antiseptic surgery, bacteriology, chemistry—were given to the world by Christians.
Jesus Christ has changed the world forever. No one has accomplished more good for this world than He.

Have the Master’s hands, which have touched this world, touched you? Has He made you new? Has your sin been washed away? Christ can make you brand new today. He died on the Cross to take away your sin. He paid the penalty you could never pay, and He offers freely the gift of eternal life to those who will trust in Him.

Adapted from Dr. Kennedy’s sermon, The Man Who Divided Time in Half.