I counted an episode when God directs someone to act or move, while deliberately leaving some important information to be disclosed after they obey—the destination, person, instructions, significance, or next step.
With that definition, I get about 10 strong episodes, with another 5–7 broader examples. I would not pretend this is an exact concordance-level number, because some passages sit right on the boundary.
The strongest examples
#
Person
Passage
What they knew
What came later
1 Abraham
Genesis 12:1–7
Leave country, family, father’s house
Which land: “the land that I will show you.” God identifies it as Abraham goes.
2 Abraham
Genesis 22:1–14
Take Isaac and go to Moriah
The particular mountain: one “of which I shall tell you”; ultimately God also provides the ram.
3 Gideon
Judges 7:9–15
Go down toward the Midianite camp
What Gideon will hear there strengthens him for what follows. God explicitly says he will hear it after going down.
4 Samuel
1 Samuel 16:1–13
Go to Jesse in Bethlehem; one of his sons is God’s king
Which son. “I will show you what you shall do…you shall anoint…him whom I declare to you.”
5 Elijah
1 Kings 17:2–9
First go to Cherith
After the brook dries up, a second instruction comes: go to Zarephath, where God has appointed a widow.
6 Ezekiel
Ezekiel 3:22–27
Get up and go into the valley
“There I will speak with you.” Ezekiel goes before receiving the message.
7 Philip
Acts 8:26–40
Go south to the desert road from Jerusalem to Gaza
No reason is initially stated. There he encounters the Ethiopian; then the Spirit gives the next instruction: approach the chariot.
8 Saul
Acts 9:1–19
Get up and enter Damascus
“You will be told what you are to do.” Ananias subsequently comes to him.
9 Peter
Acts 10:9–48
Go downstairs and accompany the men
Peter doesn’t yet grasp the meaning of his vision. The significance unfolds through Cornelius and Peter’s realization concerning the Gentiles. The Spirit simply says to accompany them.
10 Paul & companions
Acts 16:6–15
Keep moving while certain routes are closed
At Troas comes the Macedonian vision; they conclude that God has called them to preach there. Then comes Philippi and Lydia.
So my conservative count is 10 distinct episodes.
And something interesting happens when we tighten the definition even further.
The “Acts 9:6” category
Suppose we require God essentially to say:
“Do this/go there, and afterward I’ll tell/show/speak to you.”
Then I find at least these six particularly explicit examples:
1. Abraham — Genesis 12:1
Go → “the land that I will show you.”
2. Abraham — Genesis 22:2
Go → the mountain “of which I shall tell you.”
3. Gideon — Judges 7:9–11
Go down → “you shall hear what they say, and afterward…”
4. Samuel — 1 Samuel 16:3
Go → “I will show you what you shall do.”
5. Ezekiel — Ezekiel 3:22
Go into the valley → “there I will speak with you.”
6. Saul — Acts 9:6
Go into the city → “you will be told what you are to do.”
That is a remarkably consistent biblical construction:
GO → THEN I WILL SHOW/TELL/SPEAK.
And Philip may be the most beautiful narrative example
Acts 8:26 doesn’t tell Philip:
Go find an Ethiopian government official who is reading Isaiah 53, explain that the passage points to Jesus, baptize him, and thereby participate in the gospel moving outward.
He gets essentially:
Get up. Go south. Take the desert road.
So Philip goes.
Then he sees the chariot.
Then the Spirit says:
“Go over and join this chariot.”
Then he hears Isaiah.
Then the question comes.
Then Philip explains Jesus.
Then they encounter water.
It is instruction arriving at walking speed.
But there is an important caution
I wouldn’t turn this into the principle “God never tells you why until after you obey.” Scripture contains plenty of counterexamples.
Gideon, for instance, is explicitly told his mission: save Israel from Midian. David asks whether he should attack the Philistines and receives both the command and the promised outcome before acting. Ananias is actually given quite detailed information about Saul before he leaves.
So the biblical pattern is subtler:
Sometimes God explains before obedience. Sometimes he explains while a person is obeying. Sometimes understanding comes only afterward.
And that makes your Acts 9:6 observation stronger rather than weaker.
There really is a repeated biblical pattern in which obedience does not require possession of the whole map.
Abraham doesn’t know the country.
Samuel doesn’t know the son.
Ezekiel doesn’t know the message.
Philip doesn’t know the man.
Saul doesn’t know the assignment.
But each knows the next step.
And perhaps the most interesting wording isn’t “go without knowing.” It’s:
“Go, and you will be told.”
The uncertainty isn’t necessarily an absence of guidance. The next piece of guidance is waiting farther down the road.
Consider John 4,
Yes—and I think John 4 adds an important different category to the pattern.
John does not tell us that the Father said, “Jesus, go through Samaria.” Instead:
“And he had to pass through Samaria.” — John 4:4
Then the encounter unfolds: the woman, the request for water, the conversation, her recognition of Messiah, the abandoned water jar, the townspeople coming toward Jesus.
Only afterward does Jesus interpret what is happening:
“My food is to do the will of him who sent me and to accomplish his work.” — John 4:34
And then:
“Lift up your eyes, and see that the fields are white for harvest.” — John 4:35
So this isn’t quite “God said go, and later explained why.”
It’s something perhaps closer to what you’re calling diosidencia—God-incidence: walking faithfully into an apparently ordinary circumstance and then recognizing the Father’s activity within it.
That gives us at least three biblical patterns:
1. “Go, and I will tell you.”
Abraham, Samuel, Saul.
The divine command is unmistakable; the explanation waits.
2. “Go,” without being told what you’ll encounter.
Philip on the desert road.
The direction is given; its significance emerges along the way.
3. “I was going—and discovered God was already at work there.”
John 4.
No recorded supernatural direction to Samaria is necessary. Jesus encounters the woman and recognizes what the Father is doing.
And there is something in John itself that makes that third category especially powerful. Jesus later says:
“The Son can do nothing of his own accord, but only what he sees the Father doing.” — John 5:19
That’s almost a description of the posture.
Not necessarily:
“Father, give me the entire assignment.”
But:
“What is my Father doing here?”
That changes how I hear John 4:4—“he had to pass through Samaria.” Geographically, Jews could and often did travel through Samaria. But narratively, John may be giving “had to” (edei, δεῖ) more weight than simple geography. John’s Gospel repeatedly portrays Jesus’ movements in relation to divine purpose and timing.
And your diosidencia idea fits especially well with the end of the story. The woman doesn’t merely receive something from Jesus. She becomes part of what the Father is doing: she goes back to town saying, “Come, see…” (4:29), and people start coming.
Jesus looks at those approaching people and tells the disciples:
Look up. Look at the field.
Almost as though the lesson is:
You thought we were travelling through Samaria.
You thought I was sitting beside a well because I was tired.
You thought we were talking about lunch.
Look again. The Father is working.
And that connects beautifully with the question you’ve been carrying lately: not simply “What am I supposed to do?”, but “Where am I? Who is this person beside me? What is God already doing here?”
That may actually deserve its own category in our count: recognition after encounter, rather than instruction before obedience.
Yes. If by “such incidents” you mean people moving through ordinary circumstances without a recorded “God told me to go there,” and only in/after the encounter does God’s purpose become visible, there are quite a few. That is a slightly different and, I think, richer category than our original “Go, and I’ll tell you later.”
Some particularly strong examples:
- Ruth “happens” into Boaz’s field — Ruth 2:2–3. This may be the clearest Old Testament example of your diosidencia. Ruth simply goes gleaning, and the narrator almost winks at us: “she happened to come to the part of the field belonging to Boaz.” Neither Ruth nor Naomi arranged it. Only afterward does Naomi recognize the significance: “The man is a close relative of ours, one of our redeemers” (2:20). What looks accidental from Ruth’s viewpoint is woven into the much larger story.
- Saul looking for donkeys — 1 Samuel 9:3–21. This one is wonderful. Saul isn’t seeking God’s calling. He’s looking for his father’s missing donkeys. The unsuccessful search leads him toward Samuel. Meanwhile, God has already told Samuel, “Tomorrow about this time I will send to you a man from the land of Benjamin” (9:16). Saul thinks he’s searching for donkeys; God is bringing Israel’s future king to Samuel. Only when Saul arrives does he begin discovering what is happening.
- Rebekah goes to the well — Genesis 24:10–27. Rebekah apparently goes about an ordinary task: drawing water. She doesn’t know Abraham’s servant has just prayed for God’s guidance concerning Isaac’s wife. Her ordinary act of hospitality becomes the answer to someone else’s prayer. The servant recognizes it before she does: “the LORD has led me…” (v. 27).
- Jacob arrives at a particular well — Genesis 29:1–14. Jacob journeys east, comes upon shepherds gathered at a well, asks where they’re from—and discovers they’re from Haran. Then: “Rachel is coming with the sheep!” There isn’t a recorded divine voice directing him to that particular well at that particular moment. Yet the encounter leads directly into the family through whom much of Israel will come.
- Joseph encounters an unnamed man — Genesis 37:12–17. Jacob sends Joseph to find his brothers. They’re gone. Joseph is wandering in the fields when “a man found him.” The man happens to have heard the brothers saying they were going to Dothan. Joseph goes there—and that seemingly tiny encounter moves him toward the pit, Egypt, and eventually the preservation of his family. Joseph later interprets the whole chain: “God sent me before you to preserve life” (Genesis 45:5).
- Moses at the well in Midian — Exodus 2:15–22. Moses is fleeing Pharaoh, sits down beside a well, and encounters Jethro’s daughters being mistreated. He intervenes. That unannounced encounter gives him a home, a wife and a new life in Midian—the very region in which he will later encounter God at the burning bush.
- David arrives at the battle — 1 Samuel 17:17–26. David isn’t sent to fight Goliath. Jesse essentially sends him with groceries: grain, bread and cheeses, and to check on his brothers. David arrives just as the armies are taking their positions and hears Goliath’s challenge. The errand becomes the setting for something neither Jesse nor David appears to have anticipated.
- Esther — Esther 4:12–16. Esther wasn’t originally placed in the palace knowing why. Only when the crisis arrives does Mordecai offer the interpretive question: “And who knows whether you have not come to the kingdom for such a time as this?” Notice the humility of “who knows?” He recognizes providence without claiming God privately explained everything to him.
- The Emmaus road — Luke 24:13–35. Two disciples are simply walking home in grief. A stranger joins them. Only afterward, at the table, do they recognize Jesus—and then reinterpret the road retrospectively: “Did not our hearts burn within us while he talked to us on the road?” They recognize significance after experiencing it.
- Paul in Athens — Acts 17:16–34. Paul is waiting for Silas and Timothy. There’s no recorded command saying, “Go evangelize Athens.” While waiting, he sees the city’s idols, begins engaging people, gets brought to the Areopagus, notices the altar “TO THE UNKNOWN GOD,” and works with what is in front of him. An apparent delay becomes ministry.
And there is another one I’d put very close to John 4:
Jesus and Zacchaeus — Luke 19:1–10.
Jesus is “passing through” Jericho (v. 1). Zacchaeus climbs the tree because he wants to see him. Jesus looks up: “Zacchaeus, hurry and come down, for I must stay at your house today.”
There’s that word again: must.
The encounter culminates with:
“For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”
So I’d now revise our original framework. There seems to be a biblical spectrum:
Command → obedience → understanding
Abraham, Samuel, Saul.
Direction → encounter → further direction
Philip and the Ethiopian.
Ordinary journey → unexpected encounter → recognition of God’s work
Ruth, Saul’s donkeys, David’s cheese delivery, Paul waiting in Athens.
Encounter → retrospective recognition
Emmaus.
And John 4 sits beautifully across the last two.
Jesus is tired. He sits at a well. A woman comes for water. They talk. She leaves. People start coming.
Then Jesus effectively says to his disciples:
Look.
That word may be important for what you’re exploring. The spiritual discipline in these stories isn’t necessarily figuring out beforehand what God is secretly arranging.
It’s learning to notice.
That protects diosidencia from becoming “every coincidence is a coded message from God.” Esther gives us the wonderfully modest “Who knows?” Emmaus gives us recognition afterward. John 4 gives us “Lift up your eyes.”
And perhaps Joseph eventually gives us the mature form of it: years later, looking backward across circumstances he could never have interpreted correctly while they were happening, he can say, “God sent me before you to preserve life.”
There may be a very fruitful biblical study hiding here: Providence recognized in retrospect—not “How do I decipher God’s secret plan?” but “How do people in Scripture learn to recognize God’s hand after they have encountered it?”
