After being involved in a massacre of Indonesian villagers while he was serving as a soldier,[2] he endured a period of severe emotional stress, and later was wounded in the ankle during the fighting.

[3] In July 1955, van der Bijl visited Communist Poland to attend the 5th World Festival of Youth and Students in Warsaw, where he met a Christian bookstore owner that told him about a lack of Bibles in the Soviet Union.

A man who lived in Amersfoort, Karl de Graaf, claimed that God told him to teach van der Bijl to drive.

Although van der Bijl was violating the laws of all of the countries that he visited by bringing religious literature, he often placed the material in view when he was stopped at police checkpoints, as a gesture of his trust in what he believed to be God's protection.

[6] Van der Bijl visited China in the 1960s, after the Cultural Revolution had created a hostile policy towards Christianity and other religions, during the era of the so-called Bamboo Curtain.

Due to the press exposure following the book, van der Bijl stopped personally smuggling Bibles and Christian literature to other countries, and shifted to evangelism and fundraising campaigns in North America and Europe to support Open Doors.

[11] After the fall of Communism in Europe, van der Bijl shifted his focus to the Middle East and worked to strengthen the church in the Muslim world, having visited Lebanon several times in the 1970s.

In similar fashion, van der Bijl and a companion, Al Janssen, visited Hamas and PLO leaders, including Ahmed Yassin and Yasser Arafat.