Iptables newbie question

[StickyBit]

I'm attempting to configure iptables for the first time. I created a firewall-2.4 file with iptable commands to perform nat and basic filtering. My question is, does iptables run as a daemon on the system? After running the script I perform ps -ef | grep iptables and see nothing that tells me that it does. Therefore, am I correct in assuming that iptables is apart of the kernel and will not show up as a process on the system? Or should I see something indicating that iptables is running.

I'm running Redhat 7.3

Thanks,

StickyBit.