Source: http://rlprayerbulletin.blogspot.com/
Date: June 14, 2023
Religious Liberty Prayer Bulletin | RLPB 697
NORTH KOREA: ‘ALL FOR JESUS, EVEN IN DEATH’
By Elizabeth Kendal
.jpg)
North Korea
Outside Sunchon – a city around 45km due north of Pyongyang in North Korea’s South Pyongan province – lies an inconspicuous farmhouse. Every Sunday morning at 5am, five Christians (all relatives) have met at that Tongam village farmhouse for a secret time of prayer and worship. Local North Korean sources told Radio Free Asia (RFA, 28 May) that on Sunday 30 April, the five believers gathered at the farmhouse at 5am only to discover that someone had betrayed them. Responding to a tip-off from a local informant, police were waiting to arrest the believers. The believers’ ‘crime’ is that they were worshipping and serving God in a country where the Kim dynasty alone is to be worshipped and obeyed. Putting God above the Kim dynasty is a political crime in North Korea, the penalty for which would normally be that the accused – along with three generations of their family – would be imprisoned in a concentration camp and condemned to hard labour. These prisons are essentially death camps, where many prisoners die from brutality and starvation.
A local resident told RFA: ‘At the site of the worship service, the police retrieved dozens of Bible booklets and arrested all in attendance.’ A second local resident told RFA that despite pressure from authorities, the five Christians have refused to renounce their faith. ‘A staff member of the judicial agency told us that the [believers] refused to tell where they got their Bibles and said, “All for Jesus, even in death”.’
There might not be a country on the face of the earth whose history is a tragic as North Korea’s. Korea had long been a difficult mission field. Then, in 1904, the Korean Peninsula succumbed to Shinto nationalist Japan’s imperial expansion. With Japanese occupation came the horrendous racist cruelty and anti-Christian persecution that had long defined Shinto nationalism. From within this ‘furnace’, the young Korean Church rose to become the voice of Korean independence. Consequently, the Gospel came to be known not merely by some literate educated elites, but by Korea’s downtrodden masses. The Church grew and Christianity came to be identified with Korean nationalism. That the UK (in 1902) and US (in 1905) supported Japan’s annexation of the peninsula left Koreans – and especially the Korean Church – feeling betrayed and abandoned. Waves of anti-foreign and especially anti-American sentiment swept over the Korean people and into the Korean Church. The 1907 Great Pyongyang Revival was born in repentance of those angry, bitter and divisive sentiments. [See, The Korean Pentecost: and the sufferings which followed, by William Blair and Brice Hunt; Banner of Truth Trust, 1977.] Marked by repentance and tears, the 1907 Great Pyongyang Revival was a true revival driven by the Holy Spirit who convicts us of guilt/sin and makes Christ known (John 16:5-16) [Documentary: 1907 Pyongyang Great Revival in Korea, YouTube, 39 mins.] It is no exaggeration to say that this ‘Korean Pentecost’ transformed the Korean Peninsula, which Japan then officially annexed in 1910.
In 1945, in the final stages of World War 2, the Allies ousted the Japanese from Korea and divided the peninsula between themselves: the North would be controlled by the Soviet Union, and the South by the USA. In 1950, in an attempt to unify the country militarily, the Soviet-backed North invaded the South, triggering the Korean War (1950-1953). Though a ceasefire was declared in July 1953 – with the peninsula divided along the 38th parallel – the war was merely frozen, not ended. After the border closed, an estimated 2,300 churches and about 300,000 church members disappeared from the North. An Iron Curtain descended between North and South Korea in the form of a total communications blackout, and a Demilitarised Zone (DMZ) of landmines, barbed wire and snipers. That the Church has survived and may even comprise as many as 200,000 imperilled and imprisoned, suffering believers is nothing short of extraordinary.
Our prayer must be that North Korea be free. I still maintain that talks are the only option [see RLPB 423, North Korea: Talks the Only Option, 13 Sep 2017]. Those who advocate a military solution have no regard for human life, and often much to gain from waging war. North Koreans desperately need us to pray that God would intervene to ‘do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine’ (Ephesians 3:20-21 NIV). North Korean suffering is so extreme [The Korea Herald, 13 June] and the repression so intense [Daily NK, 6 June] that suicide rates are skyrocketing, up about 40 percent compared to last year [RFA, 5 June]. Despite this, the World Health Organisation (WHO) just elected North Korea to its Executive Board. This too is an obscene betrayal and abandonment of suffering North Koreans. Lord have mercy!
PLEASE PRAY THAT GOD WILL INTERVENE:
- to ‘do immeasurably more than all we ask or imagine’ (Ephesians 3:20-21 NIV), that North Koreans might know freedom, so they might seek and find truth, healing and hope in Jesus Christ.
The earth is the Lord’s and the fullness thereof, the world and those who dwell therein… Lift up your heads, O gates! And be lifted up, O ancient doors, that the King of glory may come in (from Psalm 24).
- sustain and protect the five believers arrested at the Tongam village farmhouse on 30 April – and indeed every North Korean believer currently incarcerated on account of their faith. May violent hands be restrained, and may God supply their every need – physical, emotional and spiritual. May Christ redeem their suffering and may their Christian witness not be in vain.
- to pour out his Holy Spirit in grace in power over the North once again: may North Korean abusers know conviction of sin and that irresistible divine call to repent and make things right. May suffering and starving North Koreans be moved by the Spirit to seek help from God. May everything that stands in the way of change – including arrogance, ambition, pride, folly, fear, hatred, greed and prejudice – be blown away.
‘The nations roar like the roaring of many waters, but he will rebuke them, and they will flee far away,
chased like chaff on the mountains before the wind and whirling dust before the storm.’ (From Isaiah 17:12-14)