What Noah gives to God, God gives back to Noah- all clean beasts are made sacrificial food on God’s altar, and God gives Noah all beasts for food as he elevates him to kingship and authority, possessing from God the licit power of life and death when rendering judgment. This is very close (and not accidentally so, I think) to the old Roman concept of “imperium” possessed by certain magistrates in the Roman state. Most telling is the fact that Noah goes on to plant a vineyard- as God planted a garden. Noah rests in his tent as God rested in His world. Noah issues prophetic judgment on his children (Shem, Ham, and Japheth) just as God did the same for Adam, Eve, and the Serpent- His children, the “sons of God” in Genesis 3. This ascension into God’s rest and God’s exercise of authority in creation is of profound significance for the life of the Kingdom, and specifically for how we understand authority in the Church.
Everything said above is designed to connect in one’s mind the intimate bond existing among the divine Presence, the Holy Spirit, the “divine council”, the unification of the nations, and the One, Holy, Catholic, and Apostolic Church. Seventy nations correspond to seventy thrones in God’s council because God brings all nations to share in His sabbatical rest and sit with Him on His Throne as Jesus promises in Revelation. A prophet is a member of God’s heavenly council by the indwelling Spirit- seen obviously in Isaiah 6 but also in countless other passages- and it is the Spirit who flows out and gathers in the nations of the world into the city of God, overshadowed by the divine Glory. A city is characterized by a highly specified and complicated structure governing the relation of its parts and subsidiary units to the whole. In a field, one might scatter a few stones to the wind so that their spatial relation has no meaningful pattern that is visible. But in the kind of size appropriate for cities, each part is structured such that its relation to all other parts is purposeful. It concretely realizes the purpose for which the whole city grows as an organism.
The architectural structure just described symbolically corresponds to a *social* structure. In antiquity, the priest-king ascends a stepped pyramid in the year-rite to become the mediating point of Heaven and Earth. Each step of the pyramid corresponds to a layer of structure in the society (i.e. city) on whose behalf the priest-king is mediating. In India, certain temples (in stepped pyramid form) actually depict images of distinct groups of people at each step of the pyramid. The physical and political cosmos are mutually interior. The coronation of the King, princes, lords, and others: creates a persistent pattern governing the mode in which an increasingly complicated society is linked together in relations of mutual obligation and benefit. God remakes the world in the Incarnation and the accomplishment of the Messiah- and so Isaiah 32 says that the Messianic “King shall rule in Righteousness, and His princes shall rule in justice.” We see that the two are in one way, a single subject of operation. The prophets speak of the king who will rule in “justice and righteousness.” To take one of these words and apply it to the king while using the other for His princes is to imply that the princes are extensions of the king’s own reign. They are his household, representing him in the literal sense- not “standing in” where there is absence, but “re-presenting” and bringing about true presence.
All of this is why Paul speaks of Christians *taking each other to court* and being the *judges of the world* in the context of the paschal sacrifice- by the Spirit- of the new covenant, 1 Corinthians 5- the Eucharist which unifies the churches as one Church in one Spirit.