Understanding Divine Providence

The Way Of God | Section II | Paragraph 1-3

It’s clear that every single being — celestial or earthly — was created to play a specific and important part in the ultimate goal of the universe, Ramchal assures us. Thus, everything’s makeup was specifically formulated by G-d to fulfill its role in that.

Since everything was created for a reason, it follows then that everything continues to exist specifically in order to benefit the whole. That’s why when G-d created everything He decided to oversee each thing, in order to keep it on the specific course He wanted it to follow.

Now, as we’d already said the creation of the material world began with the Transcendent Forces, out of which emitted all physical things and their specific qualities. For there is nothing in the material world — either major of minor — that isn’t somehow rooted in some element of those Forces.

That being in place, G-d Himself then oversees each thing along the lines He created them, in that He first oversees the Transcendent Forces and everything that results from them, then He oversees the angels and sees to it that they carry out their duties.

We humans are unique because of our free will and our inherent ability to achieve perfection or not to, and because we’re active, vital agents in this universe rather than passive ones. So the sort of Divine supervision touching on us is necessarily unique, too.

All of our activities are overseen and all of their consequences — everything we do and everything that comes about, as a result, is scrutinized, and G-d reacts to each one of us in light of all that, measure for measure.

That’s not true of other beings. They’re reactive rather than active agents and merely exist to maintain their species in ways set out by their roots. So they’re supervised in ways appropriate to that.

But since we humans are indeed active and we affect things on our own, we’re each explicitly overseen 5 in light of our actions. But we’ll expand on this later.