What You Need to Know About the Ravi Zacharias Sex Allegations
By: Mishael Witty
Tags: Christianity, Relationships, Ravi Zacharias, This Happened To Me, Sex Scandals

A shocking Facebook post

On the first day of October 2020, one of my Facebook friends posted a link to an article she’d just read. One that had shocked and angered her.

I have to admit to being a little confused by the headline at first. Surely the sexual misconduct hadn’t been committed by Ravi Zacharias himself. They had to be investigating somebody else, for some other reason.

But no. The charges actually were against him.

Three women came forward months after his death and complained that he had sexually harassed them. I’m not going to go into detail here. You can read plenty of details (probably more than you want to) in the article posted above.

I found the whole thing to be rather pornographic and tasteless, especially coming from a site like Christianity Today.

It’s an old story

I, personally, am not totally convinced the allegations are true. One thing that makes me question it, honestly, is the great amount of detail that was provided by these women in the absence of any recordings.

All of the women expressed some level of distress and trauma as a result of what they said Zacharias did to them. Psychological research tells us that traumatic memories can be unreliable. They could have added things to their narrative later that didn’t happen, or they could be embellishing things that did happen.

Or they could be telling the whole, unvarnished truth. And, if they are, it’s an unfortunate tale that has been told over and over again for millennia. Men of God succumb to the flesh and destroy their lives, as well as the lives of others.

An example from the Bible

We all know about David, the “man after God’s own heart” (1 Samuel 13:14; Acts 13:22). We know about how he fought against the giant Goliath and won because of his faith in God (1 Samuel 17). We’re familiar with many of his psalms.

And most of us know about how he was supposed to be leading his troops off to war, but he stayed home and spied on a married woman bathing on her rooftop. Then he summoned her to his bed, got her pregnant, tried to cover up the deed, and killed her husband when he couldn’t (2 Samuel 11–12; 1 Kings 1–2).

David’s flesh won out over his devotion to God, and two innocent people died — Uriah and the baby David and Bathsheba produced.

An example from my life

When I was a teenager, I went to a church led by a pastor who succumbed to his flesh in much the same way.

He was undergoing some sort of liver surgery, and a married woman came to visit him at the hospital. Often, from the sounds of it. I think he had actually been giving her “marriage counseling” before that.

One thing led to another, of course, and soon after he was released from the hospital he announced to the church that he would be leaving — his family and the church. And the woman, of course, split apart her family.

I was 16 or 17 at the time, and I was crushed. I had looked up to him as a man of God … a man who, I thought, was sold out to the Lord and His work. His marriage vows should have meant something to him.

That disillusionment affected me deeply, and for a long time. When I was in college, I started out going to a local church. But one day, after the service, the pastor (who looked to be about the same age as that other one) smiled at me and held my hand just a few seconds too long when he was shaking it. All I could think about was that guy who had turned his back on God and his family.

I never set foot in that church again.

My memories of the pastor’s misconduct weren’t the only thing keeping me out of church. I had a great deal of sin in my own life at the time, in addition to the aftermath of my own experiences with sexual abuse.

None of it was a good excuse for running away from God. I was doing exactly what Satan wanted me to do.

Is Ravi Zacharias a fallen hero of the faith, or a slandered dead man?

Stories like this one involving Ravi Zacharias and my former pastor are just the sort of thing Satan uses to draw people away from the church. To try to steal a little of God’s glory.

It worked for me. And I’m praying that this news won’t destroy God’s reputation. No matter what people do, God never changes. He is still good, holy, and righteous. We need to stop looking at men (who are all imperfect, and we already know that), and look to God (who is perfect, and more people need to know it).

I’m still wondering why Christianity Today published this article. They wrote another article explaining why, but that explanation wasn’t very satisfactory.

They mentioned the desire for the article to lead to repentance, like Nathan confronted David and called him to repentance (2 Samuel 12), but Ravi Zacharias is dead. There is no chance of repentance for him now.

Maybe it could spark a desire to repent within other Christian leaders who are dealing with the same sin. And it could, and should, remind us all that God can use ANYONE, despite their struggles with the flesh. No one can argue that Ravi Zacharias and his ministry haven’t done some good for the kingdom of God.

However, there was nothing in the original article that pointed people back to God, and there was quite a lot in that article that could cause people who have a problem with sexual temptation to fall themselves. That’s why I felt I had to write this.

I wanted there to be something redeeming in that article. There wasn’t, so I’m putting it in this. The fact is, all of us struggle with some sin or other. All of us fall (Romans 3:23). But God’s forgiveness is always available to us, should we turn back to Him and confess how we’ve messed up (1 John 1:9).

And we do ourselves and others a great disservice when we put people up on a pedestal they don’t deserve to be on. In fact, in a way, that is idolatry. It’s breaking the first commandment. That’s something we all need to repent of.

Let’s focus on and worship God alone. He never disappoints!