"Freedom isn't free!"

January 30 is International Holocaust Memorial Day.  and Germany is marking the 80th anniversary of Adolf Hitler's rise to power with the opening of an open-air documentation center in Berlin.  Called "Berlin 1933.  On the Path to Dictatorship," the exhibition is built on the actual site of the former headquarters of the Gestapo, the Nazi secret police!  Current Chancellor Angela Merkel spoke at the opening ceremony of the new exhibit and said, in part, "Human rights don't assert themselves.  Freedom doesn't preserve itself all alone and democracy doesn't succeed by itself. ... That must be a constant warning for us, Germans. ... Hitler's rise to power was aided by the MAJORITY'S SILENCE!  We're facing our history, we're not hiding anything, we're not repressing anything.  We must confront this to make sure we are a good and trustworthy partner in the future, as we already are today, thankfully."  Mary K. and I served in Gerany in the 1950's just a few years after the end of World War II  and we'll never forget our first visit to the former  concentration camp at Dachau, just a few miles north of Munich.  It graphically revealed the results, not just of Naziism's inhamanity to man, but also the MAJORITY'S refusal to protest it.  In reading about this today it was also noted that a radio station in Israel had featured a discussion by academic experts on Holocaust history and political science where the conditions that allowed Hitler to rise to power in a democracy were analyzed with an eye to today's rising Europen anti-semitism!  What couln't happen in Germany DID happen...and it could happen in our own country!  With over 200 years of political, civil and religious liberty, America is in danger of losing its blood-bought freedoms.  There are those on the streets and in high places who believe our Constitution is archaic, the Bill of Rights should be changed to more "progressive" rights and the Bible is no longer a basis for right and wrong!  May God help us!  The Lord Jesus Christ makes it clear:  "...ye shall know the Truth, and the Truth shall make you FREE. ...If the SON shall make you free, ye shall be FREE indeed!" (John 8:32,36).  If the Lord tarries His return and the U.S.A. continues to exist as a FREE naation, we must obey God's Word:  "As FREE, and not using your liberty for a cloke of maliciousness, but as the servants of God!"  (I Peter 2:13-16).  When any government or its leaders seek to replace the true God of the Bible or to become God, then we agree with the apostle as he testified in Acts 5:29:  "...We ought to obey God rather than men!"