When Joseph stands before Pharaoh in Egypt, interpreting Pharaoh’s dream and presenting the God-inspired plan to manage the upcoming great famine, Joseph has no worldly-based grounds for an optimistic expectation (unless God told Joseph ahead-of-time what to expect as part of the dream interpretation) that Pharaoh would stoop low enough to choose him as a non-Egyptian to run the entire operation (Gen. 41:33).
Joseph’s thinking at that moment probably only goes far enough to hope that Pharaoh will be grateful to the point of granting Joseph’s release from prison.
But to Joseph’s utter surprise and amazement, Pharaoh then wisely proceeds to make Joseph “ruler over all the land of Egypt” and to put on Joseph’s hand his own ring as a sign of the authority Pharaoh was transferring to Joseph (Gen. 41:38-44).
Joseph is now solely in charge of managing the collection of the vast food supplies needed in Egypt in preparation for the great famine ahead. This sets up in the very near future the reality of the events and circumstances for the fulfillment of the two prophetic dreams given to Joseph several years before in Canaan (Gen. 37:5-11).
But the point here, in terms of the danger zone of a journey of faith, is that Joseph has unknowingly paid the price in advance of this previously unexpected and unimaginable event…to instantly step-up into becoming an effective leader of the nation of Egypt in a crisis…through a brilliantly imaginative, God-composed apprenticeship in management, leadership, and humility in Potiphar’s house and in Pharaoh’s prison.
Joseph is fully prepared and ready for his unique destiny through a divinely composed and revealed game-plan having far-reaching implications extending thousands of years into the future (Gen. 12:2; 15:13-15) which he could never have engineered through human inventive imagination or contrivance. Divine foresight and premeditated planning-ahead are all over this story of the life of Joseph, beyond what human literary creativity could or would invent.
A God-composed journey of faith life-script asks us to give our all through the unfolding over time of a risk-filled scheme not of our own creation, not only to fulfill our own destiny but also to help other people through our self-sacrifice.
This concept of the giving up of some portion of our claim to worldly conventional normalcy, which is interwoven into the fabric of our journey of faith, in the end gives back far more, through selfless service to other people and also to ourselves, than we could ever have imagined.
This is a central theme portrayed in the narrative stories of faith recorded in the Bible.
This is a part of what motivates people of faith to willingly choose to live out a God-composed life-plan according to a higher calling, sometimes with huge risks and at great personal cost, come-what-may.
The Cross in the Christian Life 