Today I thought it would be beneficial to go through some of the bullet points of the timeline leading up to the story of Joseph. My hope is this will give you some of the context to understand more thoroughly the significance of this story.
- Creation and Fall - When God created humanity he gave them this mandate to fill the earth and subdue it and have dominion over it (Gen. 1:28). They fail in their responsibility to reign under God's authority as stewards of creation in the Fall of Genesis 3. Instead of relying on God's definition of good and evil they attempt to take that power for themselves. This is the tragic trajectory of the following chapters up to chapter 11. Yet within the curses following the Fall, God pronounces the first declaration of the gospel—known as the proto-euangelion (first gospel, leave it to theologians to take a simple concept and give it a nerdy, complicated term) Genesis 3:15 the offspring of the woman will crush the head of the serpent.
- Things then go from bad to worse as humanity continues to fail their creation mandate and rule creation as God's stewards. Then you get the flood (Gen. 6-9) and the tower of Babel (Gen. 11) as further evidence of the corruption of humanity and their failure to rule under God's authority.