Like Cattle to the Slaughter

I actually recently ran across an argument that god sent Jesus to us in order to save us and change the paradigm between the OT and the NT, and that he had to wait in order to allow the conditions to be correct, which is why we had an OT and a Jesus-less world up until the time of Jesus. When faced with arguments like this, it's hard not to ask, "Are you serious?"

The obvious objections are that god, being omnipotent, would not have to wait for any conditions to come true, especially not just to decide to forgive us for our supposed sins against him. What possible conditions are there that god could not overcome? This, once again, makes god somewhat less than omnipotent (which is easy to do since an omnipotent god is so hard to actually argue for). There's also the problem that this doesn't account for the bloodthirsty attributes of the god of the OT. If he was simply waiting for conditions to allow us to be "saved" by Jesus, it doesn't make sense that he would be as cruel, petty, vindictive, and evil as the OT shows him to be.

But, apart from all that, one problem really stands out to me, which is that this argument reduces all the people that came before Jesus into simple cattle playing out some part - being slaughtered until this god was satisfied in his blood lust and would allow us individuals (post Jesus) to live a life with the possibility of salvation. How arrogant (not that the normal Xian perspective isn't arrogant, but this is just piling on). When you can view all of pre-Jesus humanity as simply cattle that are playing a part to pave the way for your personal salvation, I'd say that you've lost all perspective of what it really means to be human.