Apologist Ravi Zacharias died at his home on 17 May in Atlanta, following a brief battle with sarcoma.
His life had been spent commending the Christian faith and addressing life’s greatest existential questions of origin, meaning, morality and destiny, with eloquence and grace. Through his founding and leadership of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM), Zacharias launched a global team of nearly 100 Christian scholars and authors who continue to speak, resource, train and address the questions of millions around the world.
Michael Ramsden, President of RZIM, said Ravi ‘saw the objections and questions of others not as something to be rebuffed, but as a cry of the heart that had to be answered. People weren’t logical problems waiting to be solved; they were people who needed the person of Christ. Those who knew him well will remember him first for his kindness, gentleness, and generosity of spirit. The love and kindness he had come to know in and through Jesus Christ was the same love he wanted to share with all he met.’
Early life
Zacharias’s great-great-great-grandmother shocked her Nambudiri family, the highest caste of the Hindu priesthood, by converting to Christianity. With conversion came a new surname, Zacharias, and a new path that started her descendants on a road to the Christian faith.
An unremarkable student, Zacharias was more interested in cricket than books, until his encounter with the gospel in a hospital bed. While he was recovering from a suicide attempt at age 17, Zacharias was read the words of Jesus: ‘Because I live, you will also live’. In response, Zacharias surrendered his life to Christ and offered up a prayer that if he emerged from the hospital, he would leave no stone unturned in his pursuit of truth. Once Zacharias found the truth of the gospel, his passion for sharing it burned bright until the very end. Even as he returned home from the hospital in Texas, where he had been undergoing chemotherapy, Zacharias was sharing the hope of Jesus to the three nurses who tucked him into his transport.
After emigrating to Canada, he was invited to speak across Vietnam by a missionary. On one trip, Zacharias and his travel companions’ car broke down. The lone jeep that passed ignored their roadside waves. They finally cranked the engine to life and set off, only to come across the same jeep a few miles on, overturned and riddled with bullets, all four passengers dead. He later said of this moment: ‘God will stop our steps when it is not our time, and He will lead us when it is.’
Reaching millions
After moving to the USA, he was invited by Billy Graham to speak at a conference for evangelists. In front of 3,800 evangelists from 133 countries, Zacharias opened with: ‘My message is a very difficult one...’. He went on to tell them that religions, 20th-century cultures and philosophies had formed ‘vast chasms between the message of Christ and the mind of man’. Even more difficult was his message about his fear that ‘in certain strands of evangelicalism, we sometimes think it is necessary to so humiliate someone of a different worldview, that we think unless we destroy everything he holds valuable we cannot preach to him the gospel of Christ … what I am saying is this, when you are trying to reach someone, please be sensitive to what he holds valuable.’
Heard by millions in podcasts, read by many through his 28 books, the work of RZIM expanded across the world, reaching many.
Some of those many include inmates at a Louisiana State Penitentiary, known as Angola Prison, the largest maximum-security prison in the USA. He made a deep connection with those men: the inmates made the coffin in which he was buried. As he writes in Seeing Jesus from the East: ‘These prisoners know that this world is not their home and that no coffin could ever be their final destination. Jesus assured us of that.’
Zacharias is survived by Margie, his wife of 48 years, two daughters and a son, and five grandchildren.
