Git is very flexible. You shouldn't need hundreds of branches to do what you are asking. If you want to revert the state all the way back to the 2nd change (and it is indeed a change that was already committed and pushed), use git revert. Something like:
git revert a4r9593432
where a4r9593432 is the starting characters of the hash of the commit you want to back out.
If the commit contains changes to many files, but you just want to revert just one of the files, you can use git reset (the 2nd or 3rd form):
git reset a4r9593432 -- path/to/file.txt
# the reverted state is added to the staging area, ready for commit
git diff --cached path/to/file.txt # view the changes
git commit
git checkout HEAD path/to/file.txt # make the working tree match HEAD
But this is pretty complex, and git reset is dangerous. Use git checkout <hash> <file path> instead, as Jefromi suggests.
If you just want to view what the file looked like in commit x, you can use git show:
git show a4r9593432:path/to/file.txt
For all of the commands, there are many ways to refer to a commit other than via the commit hash (see Naming Commits in the Git User Manual).