Pastor releases balloon that drops Bibles into North Korea

If any North Koreans are reading this, you will want to heed this caution: If Bowl Cut Jr. finds out you picked up one of the Bibles, you could end up in a labor camp along with the next three generations of your family. That's how Dennis Rodman's pal does things in a land where the practice of Christianity is most decidedly illegal.

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But that isn't stopping the approximately 100,000-to-400,000 North Korean Christians from desiring God's Word, and American pastor Eric Foley has found a pretty creative way of getting to them, as Fox News reports:

The balloons, made from a large sheet of "farm plastic," said Foley, are filled with hydrogen before the Bibles and "tracts" – testimonials written by other North Korean Christians – are attached at the bottom inside a sack or box. Timers are then used to release the materials in stages, dispersing them at high altitudes across North Korea. Foley and members of his Christian mission group, Seoul USA, use GPS technology to help direct where the Bibles land. Around 50,000 of them have dropped from the skies in the last year. "They are the most persecuted believers on earth," Foley said of North Korea’s estimated 100,000 Christians – 30,000 of whom are believed to be locked inside concentration camps, where they are overworked, starved, tortured, and killed. Other activist groups, like Open Doors USA, estimate that number to be even higher, reporting that the secretive nation has about 400,000 Christians.

It kind of reminds me of the Berlin Airlift, and it even makes me wonder if that's where Foley got the idea. It just goes to show that man can't devise away to keep God from going where His people desire Him. God will find a way. Often He will use a faithful servant to get it done, but God always finds a way. By the way, in case you were wondering, the official "religion" of North Korea is called Juche, and it incorporates elements of Marxism while deifying the late Kim Il Sun (who died in 1994 and nevertheless is technically still president) and even counterfeiting the Trinity in the process. It sounds pretty crazy, to be sure, but I'm not sure it's really all that different from Americans who hold up government as their de facto god and the source of all hope and power. The only difference is that they haven't yet figured out how to use the power of the state to evict God from the premises - although not for lack of effort. At any rate, pray for Pastor Foley's effort, and especially for those North Koreans who pick up these Bibles. They need help both for their safety and for their salvation, because clearly only God can liberate that Hell on Earth.