Andrew van der Bijl was born on this day 81 years ago in the Netherlands, the fourth child of a poor blacksmith. He became a Christian while enlisted in the colonial army of the Dutch East Indies after the second world war prior to Indonesia gaining independence in 1949. In 1955 he visited members of the underground church in Poland, and this was the first of his many visits to communist countries where Christians were persecuted.
In 1957 Brother Andrew travelled to Moscow in a Volkswagen Beetle which had been donated to him. The car was filled with Bibles and other banned Christian literature, but he managed to pass through numerous official checkpoints without being queried, trusting in God’s protection even though some of the banned material was in plain sight. He became known as “God’s Smuggler”, and made trips to China and Czechoslovakia as well.
In the post-communist 1990s, Brother Andrew concentrated his efforts on Islamic countries in the Middle East. He visited and explained the gospel to many prominent Muslims including Yasser Arafat, and was invited by Hamas to speak about Christianity at the Islamic University in Gaza. He said concerning his frequent visits to imprisoned terrorists: “If nobody goes to tell terrorists the Gospel, how will they ever hear it?”