Indian-born Canadian-American Christian apologist Ravi Zacharias died today at the age of 74.
After 48 years of teaching and commending Christianity, Zacharias passed away early Tuesday morning at his Atlanta home.
In March 2020, Zacharias announced he had been diagnosed with a rare form of cancer on his sacrum.
Three weeks prior to his announcement, the apologist had undergone successful back surgery when he began to experience “very severe pain, so intense in the night, especially, that I have been unable to sleep.”
A biopsy resulted in Zacharias’ diagnosis of Sarcoma, a type of cancer that begins in bone and soft tissue.
The apologist began to undergo chemotherapy treatments at MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston, Texas in hopes of shrinking the tumour. Zacharias began treatments at the centre just before its closure to patients outside of Texas due to COVID-19 restrictions.
In early May, despite success in his chemo treatments, Zacharias’ prognosis became grim. Though the cancer on his sacrum had responded to treatments, the area where the cancer had metastasized had worsened.
Sarah Zacharias Davis, Zacharias’ daughter and CEO of Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) announced Zacharias would be returning to his home in Atlanta, Georgia for “whatever time the Lord gives us.”
“It was his Savior, Jesus Christ, that my dad always wanted most to talk about,” says Davis. “Even in his final days, until he lacked the energy and breath to speak, he turned every conversation to Jesus and what the Lord had done. He perpetually marveled that God took a 17-year-old skeptic, defeated in hopelessness and unbelief, and called him into a life of glorious hope and belief in the truth of Scripture—a message he would carry across the globe for 48 years.”
The verse that changed his life
Zacharias grew up in India and came to Christ at the age of 17. A skeptic of faith, Zacharias’ life was changed after coming across the words of John 14:19, “Because I live, you will also live.”
The passage was particularly meaningful to the young man, who was in the hospital at that time for attempting to take his own life.
Zacharias promised then to “leave no stone unturned in my pursuit of truth.”
It became Zacharias’ goal to share and defend the truth of Christianity for others to find the hope he had found in Jesus. At the age of 19, he won the Asian Youth Preacher Award at the international Youth Congress.
Zacharias was later invited to speak by the Billy Graham Evangelistic Association at the inaugural International Conference for Itinerant Evangelists. This was an especially meaningful experience for the apologist, who began to ponder the need for apologetics to address the intellectual and existential barriers keeping many from accepting Christ.
He founded RZIM in 1984, one year after the conference. From that point on, Zacharias spent his time addressing life’s “big” questions of origin, meaning, mortality, and destiny.
RZIM seeks to “reach and challenge those who shape the ideas of a culture with the credibility of the Gospel of Jesus Christ” through a foundation of evangelism and apologetics.
Over the course of his ministry, which spanned 48 years, he would preach the Good News of Jesus in more than 70 countries.
Zacharias is survived by his wife, Margaret, and his three children Sarah, Nathan, and Naomi, and five grandchildren.
