Persecution fans flames of revival in North Korea

By Jasu Diaz —

Five North Korean church leaders in the Younggwang County were, hands tied behind their backs, forced to lie down as a steamroller chugged up right next to them.

“Reject Jesus Christ and swear allegiance to Kim Il-sung and his son Kim Jong-il,” barked the commander of the military unit attached to a construction engineer command. “Or you will die!”

Their names with 20 others had been discovered in a small notebook found in a wall after demolition for a widened highway to Nampo uncovered the secret church group.

“The five leaders remained stoic, showing the irrefutable clear signal that they had made their decision,” says author Eugene Bach. “They would rather die than deny the wonderful name of Jesus Christ.”

They were crushed.

The story, which took place in 1996, was related by a defector in 2005 to the US Commission on International Religious Freedom. It illustrates the futility of North Korean efforts to stamp out Christianity. While an estimated 700,000 Christians have been killed in hard labor camps, the church of North Korea has flourished underground.

Persecution has always seeded revival in Korea … all the way back to the arrival of the Gospel there in September 1866.

That’s the year of the first Christian martyr, Robert Jermain Thomas. He used employ as a translator aboard the General Sherman merchant ship to distribute Bibles in Chinese on the Taedong River en route to Pyongyang.

When a battle erupted, the locals set fire to the ship, which was stranded on a sandbar, Thomas escaped the fire only to be seized by Koreans and dragged through mud to their leader. Prostrated, Thomas extended a Bible to the leader and said “Jesus loves you” in Korean.

Chu Won Park didn’t care for pleas for mercy or Jesus’s love. With one mighty blow, he brought his sword down on Thomas’s head, splitting it in two.

He tore up the Bible and plastered its pages on the walls of his home as a trophy of triumph over the foreigner who dared to invade Korea.

Forty years later, tormented by the memory of the face of the innocent man, Chu became a Christian. The words on the pages of the Bible on his wall, he read. They led him to Christ.

“Every day those words spoke to me,” Chu said. “The Word of the Lord surrounded me in my own home. I was saved by the messenger that I had murdered.”

He was attending he Jangdaehyeon Church of Pyongyang in 1906. Out of that church sprung revival.

“It broke into one of the largest revivals in the history of Korea and forever transformed the history of Pyongyang,” writes Bach.

On the place where Chu killed Thomas, a church was planted. Today it is Pyongyang University of Science and Technology, where many missionaries went to teach and share the Gospel undercover.

Sources: Jesus in North Korea by Eugene Bach, others.