Interpretations belong to God. All through this, the Lord was with him, though thus rejected and clean forgotten as a dead man out of mind. It is as thus rejected that he becomes the interpreter, there is no true interpretation without the cross, it is there that God's interpretation has its place, its ways their accomplishment, there is in the principle of it—moral principle—the wisdom of God. His general counsels in result might be before Messiah's glory: yea, that it was to be set above the heavens, this glory of man in Jesus; but this but paved the way for Him who was lifted up to be cast down, and there all the moral ways of God have their discovery. God did as Joseph had interpreted. But also here he is to interpret the whole history and fortune of the world, its blessing and its misery, its time of comfort and of trial, and provision for it. Counsel as well as knowledge is here—the wisdom as well as the knowledge of what God's mind was. All the interpretation is identified with the low estate of Joseph, quod rota; then after righteous humiliation, and wisdom comes exaltation to power to the right hand of the throne, he becomes head of power, and conducts everything according to wisdom, and everything is reduced under Pharaoh. Here he is not only Lord but he has his Gentile wife. We have then generally in Joseph the depositary, as well as object, of the Messianic counsels, head among the Jews, supreme as to his personal dignity, the sun and moon are also to bow to him, then the interpreter of the counsels of life and death in his prison and the word of the Lord trying him also, and then the knowledge and counsel both of the world's condition, so that thereon by power all should be reduced under the authority of the throne.