What are God's works of providence? A. God's works of providence are His most holy, wise, and powerful preserving and governing all His creatures; ordering them, and all their actions, to His own glory. - Westminster Larger Catechism Q. 18.

Having created the world, how does God relate to it day by day? For some the course of the world is determined by unbending and impersonal laws inherent in nature, with no law-giver or governor behind or above those laws. For others an intelligent being exists behind the universe, but it is "beneath" him to have any concern for the particulars of human life. Still others see God as the creator, who made the world much like a watchmaker makes a watch; but who then steps out of the picture, leaving the watch to run down by itself. And for pantheists, who believe everything is God, all events and movements in the universe are simply God acting and developing toward an absolutely open-ended, i.e., unpredestined, future.