Source: Back to Jerusalem, January 2023
“It is time to begin preparing Bibles again to go into North Korea,” came the text from [a missionary] last week.
Getting money, food, supplies, and not least of all, Bibles, into North Korea in the last three years has been tough as North Korea has isolated itself from the rest of the world, but that might all be changing in 2023.
In his speech at the end of December 2022, the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un, alluded to opening North Korea back up in 2023. The North Korean self-reliant Communist strategy of Juche has clearly not worked.
North Korea’s borders between China and Russia have been tightly closed since 2020, but now, due to a lack of money and economic activities, the cross-border traffic between the nations is about to resume.
North Korea watched as China opened up its border to Hong Kong in the 1980s to become one of the busiest economic cross-border ports in the world. They mimicked the activity with a special economic zone that mimicked China’s Shenzhen and Guangzhou. In doing so, North Korea’s cross-border activity with China grew to be so influential that North Korea started to use the Chinese Yuan as their primary currency.
Chinese missionaries stand by, ready to participate in cross-border commerce with North Korea the moment they open.
You may know that neighboring South Korea is one of the world’s top missionary-sending countries, with some 22,000 foreign missionaries, some of them featured (for good or ill) in a recent article. See Christian Missionaries Target the Birthplace of Buddha in Nepal (BBC).