Text: By Carmen Welker www.realitycheck.v
Translated into ASL: June Ann LeFors

Title: From the beginning God gave us Torah - His Divine Instructions in Righteousness!

Shalom, I’m Carmen Welker. Welcome to Reality Check. Today, I am going to answer the question: Just what exactly is this Torah you keep talking about, Carmen?

The short answer is: Torah refers to the first five Books of the Bible, which contain all of YHWH’s Divine Instructions in Righteousness - His “do’s and dont’s”

The longer answer will take a little while to explain…You see, in the first five Books of the Bible we find YHWH has certain rules for His people to follow - not unlike parents who set down rules for their children. For instance, our parents potty train us and teach us table manners, and generally teach us the basics of civilized living. They explain that we will be electrocuted if we stick our fingers into an electrical socket, and to look both ways before crossing a street…Well, YHWH has rules, too and these rules are rules for LIFE; rules that keep us safe from harm and show us how to be holy unto Him, as we saw with Adam and Eve who were told they shouldn’t eat the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. Years later, when the earth became more and more populated, He laid down other rules to keep mankind safe from harm and remain holy: Don’t murder, don’t commit adultery, don’t steal, don’t lie, remember the Sabbath and keep it holy.

Early on there were at least 613 commands; some were only for men, some only for women, some were meant for a certain point in time, and MOST were for the priests, once the priesthood of Levites was established…But He gave some “forever” commands and among those were the Seventh Day Sabbath and the Feasts - all of which are practice for the Millennium when Yeshua will rule and reign for a thousand years when ALL, according to Zech 14:16, will be keeping the proper Sabbath and doing the Feasts! What makes us think we don’t have to bother with those “forever” commands NOW? After all, as we see throughout the Gospels, Yeshua kept them….

The Sabbath is our WEEKLY “date” with God; and the Feasts are our ANNUAL dates with God. They are designed to help us constantly keep our eyes on Him!…When and where were ever we told that they would be abolished after Yeshua’s death? What I’m trying to say is: There’s more to having a relationship with God than “just believing in Jesus” and going to church on Sunday. Jesus is only part of the equation. As Isaiah 53:1 tells us, Y’shua was “an arm” of YHWH. According to Luke 4: 43 and John 6: 35 He was the SON who came to proclaim the Kingdom of YHWH and do everything His Father commanded: “For I came down from heaven, not to do my will, but to do the will of Him who sent me.” Yes, He ultimately died on our behalf, but that didn’t remove the need for us to OBEY God!

A true relationship is give and take. YHWH gives us everything we need to survive in this world and He even offers us eternal life with Him. All He has ever expected in return is our love and respect culminating in the form of OBEDIENCE to His Divine Instructions in Righteousness.

In John 17: 3 Yeshua Himself said: “And eternal life is this: to know you, the one true God, and him whom you sent, Yeshua the Messiah.”

How can one get to know God or become holy except by obeying His commands and conducting our lives according to His will? I mean, think about it: Would “just believing” in our parents have saved us if we decided to cross a street without looking both ways? Of course not! We have a responsibility to apply what our parents taught us if we wish to live safely in this world and make it through life. Same thing with God. We “believe in Him”; but just “believing” doesn’t save us from the fallen world in which we live. The fact that “Jesus died” does NOT absolve us of the responsibility to continue obeying YHWH.

Before we can grasp the depth of who God is and how to be holy in His eyes, we MUST delve into those first five Books. We cannot thoroughly understand the New Testament until we do that.

Remember, in earlier segments we discussed that Torah is for ANYONE who has accepted the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. YHWH reiterated this FOUR TIMES in a row in Numbers 15:13-16, where He said that those who have accepted Him MUST do as His people do - and His people, the Hebrews, were all Torah observant! His Divine Son Yeshua was Torah observant and, contrary to popular belief, so was the Apostle Paul whom many like to use to show that Torah was abolished. But the fact is, all of Y’shua’s Apostles and Disciples and all of His followers for at least one hundred years after the death of Yeshua were Torah observant.

Without Torah we would have NO blueprint for moral, holy living. As a matter of fact, in 1 John 3:4 we are told that “sin” is “transgression of the Torah.” Torah is simply God telling His people how to be holy unto Him; it is our guide for life!

Title: Mankind’s first sin and its deadly consequences

Shalom, and welcome to Reality Check.

In the previous segment we discussed the downfall of man that began with Eve’s willingness to allow the serpent to talk her into eating the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. As the story goes, she convinced Adam to eat it as well, and once they did, everything changed! Suddenly, the couple “knew” the difference between good and evil and they apparently also recognized the difference between the genders and, consequently, the need to “cover themselves”.

And so began the first deliberate rebellion by humans against YHWH, and the invention of the first “blame game” - the birth of the “excuse” and not being personally responsible for one’s own actions as we see in Genesis 3:11-13: “He said, “Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree from which I ordered you not to eat?” The man replied, “The woman you gave to be with me - she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate.” ADONAI, God, said to the woman, “What is this you have done?” The woman answered, “The serpent tricked me, so I ate.”

Thus began man’s downfall because they had disobeyed YHWH’s Torah - His Divine Instructions in Righteousness.

In Genesis 3:21-23 we read: “ADONAI, God, made garments of skin for Adam and his wife and clothed them (this was the first sin sacrifice). ADONAI, God, said, “See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil. Now, to prevent his putting out his hand and taking also from the tree of life, eating, and living forever -” therefore ADONAI, God, sent him out of the garden of ‘Eden to cultivate the ground from which he was taken.

I would like to bring your attention to the fact that in this particular passage we see the first SIN sacrifice taking place!

YHWH killed an innocent animal to atone for this blatant disobedience of Adam and Eve, and used its skin to cover their nakedness. This is HUGE because it reveals how adamant YHWH was about obedience to His Rules!

Can you imagine how much it must have shocked Adam and Eve to see one of their pets that they had named and played with being killed before their very eyes? A sweet animal that had been guilty of nothing whatsoever except being in the vicinity of a couple who had deliberately disobeyed YHWH.

Try to imagine if this had been you and your pet dog or cat was killed to atone for YOUR sin!

What an awful day that must have been, on several levels….But the thing is, for reasons known only to YHWH, He has always demanded the blood of an innocent animal to atone for man’s sin. Why? Leviticus 17:11 tells us: “For the life of a creature is in the blood, and I have given it to you on the altar to make atonement for yourselves; for it is the blood that makes atonement because of the life.”

Ezekiel 18:20 says, “The person who sins will die”; and Romans 6:23 shows, “what one earns for sinning is death.”

God never told Adam and Eve they would die immediately after sinning; and Scripture doesn’t say we will die immediately for our sins. In fact, the original nature of man was that he would not die. God told man he would die only if he ate from the tree of the knowledge of good and evil (Genesis 2:17). Adam and Eve disobeyed, sinned, and in Genesis 3:19, God tells them they will return to the earth from where they came.

Thus you see that death for eating the forbidden fruit was not immediate death, but that where man was intended to live forever, “he will now die due to sin”. Thus, in the moral government of God, He ordained that physical and eternal death be the just penalty for sin.

People usually chafe against God’s decree, thinking it is unfair or extreme, but these protests only reveal how sin has blinded them to sin’s true nature. The fact that God requires such a drastic penalty reveals NOT that God is brutal, but that sin is heinous!”

Eventually, out of sheer love and because people kept “falling short of the glory of God”, He gave us a “FINAL sin sacrifice” via His “Son” Yeshua HaMashiyach, whom Christians call Jesus. Yeshua’s death completely eliminated the need for any more animal sin sacrifices.

Ephesians 2:8-10 tells us: “For you have been delivered by grace through trusting, and even this is not your accomplishment but God’s gift. 9 You were not delivered by your own actions; therefore no one should boast. 10 For we are God’s making, created in union with the Messiah Yeshua for a life of good actions already prepared by God for us to do.”

One more thing: YHWH could have put Adam and Eve to death after they sinned, but He didn’t - which is evidence that the “Old Testament God” was showing mercy and grace! Mercy and grace, as I have mentioned before, didn’t begin with Jesus in the New Testament as Christianity suggests! It has ALWAYS been around, since the very beginning.

So, after just the first three chapters of Genesis we’ve discovered that YHWH was the Creator, that all creation obeyed Him and the universe came into being simply because He told it to, and that He had some rules for mankind to follow for their own good. Because Adam and Eve CHOSE to disobey by going against God’s command to NOT eat the fruit of the tree of good and evil, they were banned from ever again partaking from the Tree of Life….YHWH He kicked them out of the Garden, thus permanently removing access to eternal life - which was restored only after the death of Yeshua, some four thousand years later!

Text credits: Carmen Welker via www.realitycheck.tv
Translated into ASL: June Ann LeFors

VIDEO #3

Title: In the beginning…God commanded that the Seventh Day be set apart!

Shalom and welcome to Reality Check. In the first couple of segments we discussed how the entire universe came into being because it obeyed YHWH’s commands. How the earth was formed, how the seas parted and the land and the animals and every living being came to be…And how He commanded in Genesis 2:1-2 that the Seventh Day be set apart as His day of REST for mankind.

Before we move on to the deeper things of Torah - YHWH’s Divine Instructions in Righteousness - let’s discuss that seventh day rest; let’s take a closer look at that Shabbat - or Sabbath - command, because it’s very, very important. As a matter of fact, it is so important that He called it a SIGN between Him and His people!

In Ezekiel 20:11-12 we read: “I gave them my laws and showed them my rulings; if a person obeys them, he will have life through them. I gave them my shabbats AS A SIGN between me and them, so that they would know that I, ADONAI, am the one who makes them holy.”

Exodus 20:8-11 says: “Remember the day, Shabbat, to set it apart for God. You have six days to labor and do all your work, but the seventh day is a Shabbat for ADONAI your God. On it, you are not to do any kind of work -not you, your son or your daughter, not your male or female slave, not your livestock, and not the foreigner staying with you inside the gates to your property. For in six days, ADONAI made heaven and earth, the sea and everything in them; but on the seventh day he rested. This is why ADONAI blessed the day, Shabbat, and separated it for himself.”

This is reiterated in Isaiah 58:13-14 which says: “If you hold back your foot on Shabbat from pursuing your own interests on my holy day; if you call Shabbat a delight, ADONAI’S holy day, worth honoring; then honor it by not doing your usual things or pursuing your interests or speaking about them. If you do, you will find delight in ADONAI - I will make you ride on the heights of the land and feed you with the heritage of your ancestor Ya’akov, for the mouth of ADONAI has spoken.”

Who was God talking to? The Jews? No! There were no “Jews” until Jacob fathered a son named Yehudah - or Judah - in Genesis 29:35, who ultimately became the Tribe of Judah where the term “Jew” originated….We’ll talk about that a little more in later segments.

Right now, let’s continue examining the first few of chapters in Genesis where we see YHWH giving some commands to the first humans, Adam and Eve in Genesis 2: 4-9: “Here is the history of the heavens and the earth when they were created. On the day when ADONAI, God, made earth and heaven, there was as yet no wild bush on the earth, and no wild plant had as yet sprung up; for ADONAI, God, had not caused it to rain on the earth, and there was no one to cultivate the ground. Rather, a mist went up from the earth which watered the entire surface of the ground.

Then ADONAI, God, formed a person [Hebrew: adam] from the dust of the ground [Hebrew: adamah] and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life, so that he became a living being. ADONAI, God, planted a garden toward the east, in ‘Eden, and there he put the person whom he had formed. Out of the ground ADONAI, God, caused to grow every tree pleasing in appearance and good for food, including the tree of life in the middle of the garden and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.”

In Genesis 2:16-17 We see YHWH giving the first human a clear Torah command: “You may freely eat from every tree in the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. You are not to eat from it, because on the day that you eat from it, it will become certain that you will die.”

Now, why would YHWH put a tree in the Garden that Adam wasn’t supposed to eat from? Only HE knows the answer to that, but…perhaps it was to test man’s free will? He has, after all, given us the CHOICE to obey or not. Those who do, belong to Him; those who refuse…well, whom are they really serving?

Regardless, YHWH warned Adam not to eat from that particular tree because it would completely change life as he knew it. It would open the door to spiritual things that Adam - a mere human - was simply not ready for. And so Adam obeyed. However, Eve, the woman YHWH made for him, did not. As you know, Eve allowed herself to be tempted by the serpent who was satan - whose ultimate goal was and still is to destroy YHWH’s Creation, ever since he was kicked out of heaven for rebelling against YHWH, as we see in Isaiah 14:12-15 and Ezekiel 28:12-19.

So, because this couple, Adam and Eve, CHOSE to disobey YHWH they, in effect, “lost their lives.” This is the first time we see that disobedience has severe consequences! Adam and Eve were kicked out of the Garden after they had “tasted of good and evil” and they consequently lost their right to eat any more from the Tree of Life - which resulted in the end of their “eternal life” in Utopia. Yes, they continued living, but they now faced hardship, illness and death.

Thanks to YHWH’s grace and mercy (which, contrary to popular belief, has been around since the beginning and didn’t just start with “Jesus” and the New Testament), He ultimately sent us His Son to be our Final SIN Sacrifice, which restored our access to eternal life!

VIDEO #2

Text Credit: Carmen Welker
Translated into ASL: June Ann LeFors

Title: In the beginning…God commanded that the Seventh Day be set apart!

Shalom and welcome to Reality Check.

My goal in this series of videos is to explain what Torah is. As I mentioned in my initial video, Torah is God’s Divine Instruction in Righteousness as found in the first five Books of the Bible, Genesis through Deuteronomy.

Our Creator- whose is Name YHWH - gave the very first Torah command in Genesis 1:28 when He created Adam and Eve and commanded them to be fruitful, multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.” Very simple and to the point!

Up until then the universe itself had obeyed His command to “be” - as we see in Genesis 1: 1-5: “In the beginning YHWH created the heavens and the earth. The earth was unformed and void, darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God hovered over the surface of the water. Then YHWH said, “Let there be light”; and there was light. He saw that the light was good, and He divided the light from the darkness. YHWH called the light Day, and the darkness he called Night. So there was evening, and there was morning, one day. “

Note that evening is mentioned first. This reveals that God’s “day” begins at sunset. His day is from sunset to sunset, not sunrise to sunrise. In Genesis 1: 6-11 we read: “God said, ‘Let there be a dome in the middle of the water; let it divide the water from the water.’ God made the dome and divided the water under the dome from the water above the dome; that is how it was, and God called the dome Sky. So there was evening, and there was morning, a second day. God said, ‘Let the water under the sky be gathered together into one place, and let dry land appear,’ and that is how it was. God called the dry land Earth, the gathering together of the water he called Seas, and God saw that it was good. God said, ‘Let the earth put forth grass, seed-producing plants, and fruit trees, each yielding its own kind of seed-bearing fruit, on the earth’; and that is how it was.”

YHWH then went on to place the sun, moon and stars, and in verse 20, we see that God made swarms of living creatures, and He blessed them, saying, “Be fruitful, multiply and fill the water of the seas, and let birds multiply on the earth.” Then, in verse 26 -30 we see He created mankind to rule over all the living creatures. And in verse 31 we read “YHWH saw everything that he had made, and indeed it was very good. So there was evening, and there was morning, a sixth day.”

Now, watch what happened next as we read Genesis 2: 1-3: “Thus the heavens and the earth were finished, along with everything in them. On the seventh day God was finished with his work which he had made, so he rested on the seventh day from all his work which he had made. God blessed the seventh day and separated it as holy; because on that day God rested from all his work which he had created, so that it itself could produce.”

Note that He RESTED on the SEVENTH day and separated it as holy. “Holy” means to be set apart, separate from everything else. “Holy” is what He calls US to be. And how can we be holy? Through obedience to the One who created us!

Now let’s stop for a moment and think about this: Where in the entire Bible did God ever tell us to CHANGE the command to keep His SEVENTH Day holy, or to change His Sabbath to Sunday, which is the first day of the week on our Gregorian calendars?

The answer is: Nowhere!

God never said the Seventh Day rest was to be changed to Sunday; MAN did - People like Roman Emperor Constantine who forbade the Christians to adhere to anything “Jewish.” Constantine was a sun worshipper who became a famous Christian, advancing pagan Christianity throughout the Roman Empire. His version of “Christianity” included many pagan rituals, including “Sun-day” and Tammuz and Ishtar worship we today we know as Christmas and Easter.

The fact is, YHWH established the SEVENTH DAY as holy and set it apart as a SIGN between Himself and His people, as we see in Ezekiel 20: 11-12 which reads: “I gave them my laws and showed them my rulings; if a person obeys them, he will have life through them. I gave them my shabbats (or SABBATHS) as a SIGN between me and them, so that they would know that I, YHWH, am the one who makes them holy.”

This Sabbath issue was actually the turning point that caused ME to first realize there was something amiss in our churches. How dare we ignore the command to keep the Seventh Day, especially since neither YHWH nor His Son ever said to change it to some other day?

Take a look at Daniel 7:25 which refers to the coming Antichrist: “He will speak words against the Most High and try to exhaust the holy ones of the Most High. He will attempt to ALTER THE SEASONS AND THE LAW; and [the holy ones] will be handed over to him for a time, times and half a time.”

Who are the “holy ones?” Are they the ones who reject YHWH’s Divine Commands known as Torah, and those who refuse to keep His commanded Seventh Day? NO! Holy people OBEY God! The entire universe obeyed YHWH, so what makes us think we don’t have to?

As hard as this might be to hear and digest, Christianity has changed His laws, His Sabbath and His appointed times…His Seventh Day Sabbath and the feasts! Please think about that very long and hard, and we’ll discuss this a little more in future segments.

Carmen Welker of has a Reality Check video (spoken in English) posted on This is an ASL translation of her videos that are posted up.

Text below: Credit goes to Carmen Welker
Translated into ASL: by June Ann LeFors

Carmen Welker is a Netzarim (Messianic) Torah teacher and webmaster of The Refiner’s Fire: http://therefinersfire.org/ who has written several books designed to explain Torah (God’s Divine Instructions in Righteousness) to the world: http://betorahobservant.com/

She recently began producing some YouTube videos entitled, “Reality Check” which are designed to help Christians understand why they should be Torah observant: http://realitycheck.tv/

This site was created by June Ann LeFors who translated Carmen’s teachings for our deaf friends around the world.

VIDEO #1 Title: In the beginning…the entire universe obeyed the Creator!

Hello, I’m Carmen Welker, webmaster of The Refiner’s Fire and author of “Should Christians be Torah Observant?”

Welcome to Reality Check - the first in a series of short, concise teachings designed to show you some biblical facts you’ll never hear in a church setting.

If you’re among the many who has felt there is “something missing” in your church, but you just can’t quite figure out what it is, then please join me as I reveal some simple, yet startling facts about God and the Bible in each successive video. For instance, you’ll learn that God is just a title, and that the Father actually has a Name: Yahweh; the Name some knew right from the beginning.

For instance, in Genesis 4:26 it says: “And to Seth, to him also there was born a son; and he called his name Enosh. That is when people began to call upon the name of YHWH.”

In Genesis 12:8 we see: “He (Avram) left that place, went to the hill east of Beit-El and pitched his tent. With Beit-El to the west and ‘Ai to the east, he built an altar there and called on the name of YHWH.”

And in Genesis 21:33 we read: ” Avraham planted a tamarisk tree in Be’er-Sheva, and there he called on the name of YHWH, the everlasting God.”

Now listen to this!

In Exodus 3:13-15 we read that He provided His actual Name to Moshe, or Moses: “Moshe said to God, “Look, when I appear before the people of Isra’el and say to them, ‘The God of your ancestors has sent me to you’; and they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what am I to tell them?” God said to Moshe, “Ehyeh Asher Ehyeh [I am/will be what I am/will be],” and added, “Here is what to say to the people of Isra’el: ‘Ehyeh [I Am or I Will Be] has sent me to you.’”

God said further to Moshe, “Say this to the people of Isra’el: ‘Yud-Heh-Vav-Heh [Yahweh], the God of your fathers, the God of Avraham, the God of Yitz’chak and the God of Ya’akov, has sent me to you.’ This is MY NAME FOREVER; this is how I am to be remembered generation after generation.”

You’ll also discover that Jesus, the Son, had a another Name as well: His given, Hebrew Name was Y’shua, which means “YHWH is Salvation.”

Yes, in English He is referred to as Jesus, but consider this: Our Messiah never heard the name “Jesus” in His entire life. His mother called Him Y’shua!

It’s not that hard to say. To call Him by anything else except His given Name actually detracts from who He was!

Y’shua has the Father’s Name within Him. The angels, on the other hand, did not. Their names all contain the TITLE of God - Elohim, or more specifically, the shortened “EL” in their name. For instance, the angels Michael, Gabriel, Uriel and Raphael all end with the letters E.L.; not one has YAH in his name; only Messiah Y’shua - who comes IN the NAME, and therefore in the POWER, of his Father YHWH. When we call upon YHWH in Y’shua’s name, we are calling on YHWH Himself for Salvation.

In this series of videos you will discover many interesting things that some of you have already figured out but were afraid to admit or discuss with anyone. Among them is that YHWH gave mankind some rules to follow and that there is more to having a relationship with God than just “believing in Jesus.” Those rules are called Torah which means, “Divine Instruction in Righteousness.” Without these instructions - which can be found throughout the first five Books of the Bible - Genesis through Deuteronomy - we would have NO blueprint for moral, holy living.

Please join me in this awesome adventure as we travel through the Bible together!

www.LeForsTribe.com

Teacher: Hello class! You have completed 2nd grade and have moved up to 3rd grade! I would like to do a review with you and see if you still remember what you learned last year: NOUNS. Tell me the difference between “Common Nouns” and “Proper Nouns. Tell me the meaning to “Proper Nouns” first.

Anyone? You, kids?

Yes, you raised your hands.

That’s correct. Proper Nouns is an identity name for a person, place, or a thing. When we speak of “thing”, it is not just common nouns but rather that it has a specific title for it. Right-o! You are correct, Proper Nouns do not change its names. For example, a car called Toyota in Japanese is also called Toyota in English. When President Barack Obama visits Africa, his name is still Barack Obama. Correct?

“What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.” -Romeo and Juliet