God's Smuggler

Jeremiah Marshall (13)

Smuggler:

Someone who sneaks things into a place where they are not allowed.

Typically, when we hear the word smuggler, we think of someone who smuggles weapons or other dangerous things into our country, but today I’m going to talk about someone who smuggled the right things for the right reasons.

Andrew Van der Bijl, known to us as Brother Andrew, was born in Holland in 1928. He lived there with his father, mother, and five siblings.

He joined the Dutch army at the age of 18. Though he only spent two years in the army, those two years were full of adventure. One day he found a gibbon, which is a type of monkey, with a piece of wire tangled around its waist and cutting into its skin. Andrew cut off the wire with his knife, saving its life. The monkey followed him from then on. Andrew was probably the only person in the Dutch army with a pet monkey.

Another day, his commanding officer asked him if he could drive a tank. Andrew said yes. With his commanding officer in the seat next to him, Andrew ended up crashing the tank into another tank, which crashed into another one, and so on. When asked what happened, he replied, “I said I knew how to DRIVE a tank. I didn’t say I knew how to stop one.” 

At the age of 20, Andrew was shot in the ankle and was discharged from the army. He spent weeks in the hospital recovering. One day he was given a Bible by one of the nurses. He read his Bible in bed and was led to Christ by the nuns who worked there.  After that he became passionate about God’s word, He went to every single church service and Bible study he could attend. Then Andrew discovered that there were places in the world where the Bible was not allowed to be. This is when Andrew became God’s Smuggler. For years, Brother Andrew worked for God in secret behind the Iron Curtain, a group of communist countries that had made the Bible illegal to have. Over the course of his ministry, it is estimated that Brother Andrew smuggled at least 1 million Bibles into four or more countries, including China, Poland and East Germany.

He drove a Volkswagen beetle and packed it with Bibles of all shapes and sizes. The German border patrol would check your car so thoroughly that they would look everywhere, even in the engine, and would often take cars apart to look for illegal items. Andrew boldly laid Bibles right beside him on the seat while driving into the checkpoint and prayed, “Lord, you have made blind eyes see, now you must make seeing eyes blind. But you have to do it now.” The Germans looked right at the Bibles and moved on. God had made them actually blind. Brother Andrew drove safely into the country to deliver Bibles to thousands. He definitely won the title of God’s Smuggler.

He served God faithfully until his death in 2022 at the age of 94. If you’ve never heard his story, I’d recommend that you read one or both of the following books. The first is Brother Andrew: Christian Heroes Then and Now, by Janet and Geoff Benge. This one is written more for kids. But if you want the full story, you need to read the book titled God’s Smuggler, which Andrew wrote himself.