Joseph

Joseph functions in the book as the defining image of a dream that appears abandoned but is being redirected toward fulfillment. His story joins suffering to promotion: a dream is delayed by human choices and hostile circumstances, yet God’s apparent silence proves not to be forgetfulness. Joseph’s trajectory gives the book its central assurance that a dead-looking promise may still be moving toward the throne.

Identity and Biblical Pattern

Joseph is introduced through the familiar sequence of a dream, family disclosure, rejection, a pit, imprisonment, and eventual promotion to the palace. The book does not treat these stages as disconnected misfortunes. Together they form a divinely reworked path in which Joseph’s original dream survives the circumstances that seem to bury it. His imprisonment and false accusation become part of the route rather than evidence that the promise has been canceled.

The account emphasizes that Joseph’s own judgment helped shape the delay. He shared his dream proudly with members of his family, and that unwise choice led to the pit and began a changed course. The resulting delay therefore has a moral and developmental dimension: God was not failing to answer Joseph, but was reworking the path he would have to follow. Faith opens the way, while patience proves that expectation can survive appearances.

From Pit and Prison to Promotion

Joseph’s movement through the pit, prison, and palace supplies the book with a pattern for interpreting seasons of apparent contradiction. His circumstances seemed to say that God had forgotten him, especially because false accusation and confinement stood so far from the promise represented by promotion. In retrospect, however, those very reversals became stages in the fulfillment of the dream.

The book applies this pattern directly to Hank Kunneman’s early ministry experience. While trying to find his way into ministry, Kunneman says that the Lord told him he would be like Joseph for seven years, falsely accused and hated by some. The prediction was so shocking that he pulled his car to the side of the road and cried. Within a year he was fired twice: first from a ministry position and then from secular work.

The first dismissal carried immediate practical consequences. Kunneman was a young husband and father, had to sell his first house, and moved without money or a place to live while the promise of ministry continued to ring in his mind. He and Brenda Kunneman experienced the period as confusion, emptiness, and apparent divine abandonment. He wondered whether God was angry with him and asked what he had done to deserve such circumstances, because everything around him contradicted both the divine word and the prophecies others had spoken over his future.

Seven years later, the reversal came. The Lord spoke again, asking Kunneman to pastor and directing him to go to Omaha to start a church. After the turmoil and hurt, he could scarcely believe that the call to begin a church was real. His discussion of the matter with his pastor marked the beginning of the resurrection of their ministry dream, transforming Joseph’s biblical pattern from an illustration into an interpretation of his own life.

Relationships That Advance the Dream

Joseph’s story is also used to explain the kinds of people through whom God advances a delayed promise. The book identifies three symbolic figures from Joseph’s path: the baker, the butler, and Pharaoh. Each represents a different form of providential assistance, so fulfillment is not depicted as an isolated achievement but as a network of supplied resources, opened relationships, and created opportunities.

The baker represents people who bring the necessary ingredients together. They supply resources and places in which a dream can rise and grow. The butler represents people divinely connected through relationships that open doors for service within the dream. Pharaoh represents those whom the Lord aligns with the dreamer to create a position where skills and talents can bless others. In this reading, all three figures help move Joseph toward the promise, and comparable people may become keys in the fulfillment of another person’s calling.

This relational pattern also explains why the book advises caution in sharing dreams. Joseph’s dream was delayed after he disclosed it proudly to his family, yet later relationships became instruments of advancement. The contrast is precise: indiscriminate disclosure can expose a dream to opposition or immature handling, while rightly timed connections can provide the resources, access, and public position through which the dream becomes useful to others.

Moral Testing in Private

Joseph’s character is most clearly distinguished from David in the book’s treatment of private temptation. David and Bathsheba are presented as an example of a person who failed to protect his eyes and allowed an unattended opportunity for sin to become a defeat. Joseph and Potiphar’s wife provide the opposite pattern: when no one else was watching, Joseph refused the invitation and recognized the act as wickedness against God.

Potiphar’s wife pursued Joseph repeatedly, speaking to him day after day, but he did not heed her or agree to lie with her or remain with her. Instead, he continually looked for a door of escape. The book interprets this resistance as sowing righteousness to himself through ordinary decisions. Joseph’s inward conviction proved louder than the voice of temptation, and his conduct demonstrates that private obedience can overcome a private assault.

The comparison with David establishes that temptation is shaped not only by its presence but by the choices made around it. David entertained the temptation and invited it further into his house; Joseph resisted it and searched for escape. The book therefore presents Joseph as evidence that a person’s unseen decisions participate in the future of the dream. What is repeatedly permitted can eventually destroy, while determination to do what is right protects the person who must carry the promise.

Joseph and the Resurrection of Dead Dreams

Joseph’s narrative is connected to the raising of Lazarus, whose grave becomes an image for dreams that have decayed beyond human hope. The book recalls Martha’s judgment that the situation already stank and uses it to describe the way Christians often view their own delayed hopes. Like Martha, they see deterioration, elapsed time, and finality; like Joseph’s story, the teaching insists that delay does not prove divine neglect.

Three commands at Lazarus’s grave are applied to the recovery of a dream: take away the stone, call the dream forth, and loose it and let it go. Stones may represent barriers, including demonic delays. The book refers to Daniel’s twenty-one-day delay in prayer, explaining that an evil spiritual power hindered the answer even though the prayer had been heard from the first day. In this framework, believers are told to exercise authority against such obstruction rather than interpreting delay as proof that God has stopped listening.

Joseph’s own delay is different in emphasis because it arose from an unwise choice and required a refreshed course. Yet both kinds of delay lead to the same discipline of faith and patience. The dream must continue to be called forth even when it seems to be in a grave. Joseph’s pit and prison, followed by the palace, make the book’s final claim concrete: the route may be altered, the promise may appear to rot, and the waiting may be long, but God can still bring the dream into life again.