Bible Trivia Quiz | People Who Only Appear Once | Digging Deeper

Question 1. After Saul was struck blind on the road to Damascus, God sent a specific disciple to restore his sight and pray over him. Who was he, and why was he initially afraid to go?

Answer: Ananias (Acts 9:10–17). He was afraid because he’d heard “how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem” (9:13) and knew Saul had come to Damascus specifically to arrest believers.

Context & Exhortation: Saul is still blind. He had not eaten or drunk anything for three days (9:9), when God speaks to a disciple in Damascus named Ananias in a vision. God told Ananias exactly where to find Saul and what to do once he arrives (9:11–12).

Ananias’ response is remarkably honest, given he’s talking directly to God: “Lord, I have heard by many of this man, how much evil he hath done to thy saints at Jerusalem… to bind all that call on thy name” (9:13–14). 

He’s not being disobedient. He’s pointing out what seems like an obvious, dangerous mistake. God’s answer doesn’t remove the risk, it just restates the mission: “he is a chosen vessel unto me, to bear my name before the Gentiles” (9:15). 

Ananias goes anyway, walks into the house of a man who came to arrest people like him, and greets him with the word “brother” before he’s even confirmed anything has changed (9:17).

An ordinary disciple, appearing only in the story of Saul's conversion and in Paul's own retelling of it later in Acts, is the one who lays hands on the man who will go on to write roughly one-third of the New Testament. One man, one event, mentioned in two different places in Scripture: once when Luke tells the story, and once when Paul tells it again in his own words.

Question 2. Cornelius became the first recorded Gentile convert to receive the Holy Spirit. What was he doing at the exact moment the angel appeared to him, and what specific instruction did the angel give?

Answer: He was praying, in the middle of an ongoing pattern of prayer and giving generously to the poor (Acts 10:2–3). The angel told him his prayers and gifts “are come up for a memorial before God” and instructed him to send for Peter (10:4–5).

Context & Exhortation: Cornelius is introduced as a Roman centurion, an occupying military officer, who nonetheless “feared God with all his house, which gave much alms to the people, and prayed to God alway” (10:2). He was a devout man, by every description, who simply hadn’t yet heard the gospel.

The angel appears to him specifically during prayer, at the ninth hour, a normal Jewish hour of prayer even though Cornelius himself was a Gentile (10:3, 30). 

God had apparently been paying close attention to a man’s private devotion long before that man had any full picture of who he was praying to.

Meanwhile, God is simultaneously preparing Peter through a separate vision about unclean animals, dismantling Peter’s own assumptions about who was fit to receive the gospel (10:9–16). 

Both men needed to move before the two stories could connect: Cornelius toward obedience to an angel’s instruction, and Peter toward obedience to a vision that offended his own instincts.

A Gentile soldier’s ordinary, private faithfulness — prayers and generosity nobody was necessarily watching closely — turned out to be exactly what God used to break open the entire Gentile mission of the early church.

Question 3. When David, insulted by a wealthy man named Nabal, set out with armed men to kill every male in his household, one person intervened to stop the bloodshed before it happened. Who was she, and how did she stop him?

Answer: Abigail, Nabal’s wife (1 Samuel 25). She rode out to meet David herself with a large gift of food, fell before him, and took the blame for her husband’s insult onto herself, persuading David to stand down (25:23–31).

Context & Exhortation: Nabal had just insulted David’s men after they’d protected his shepherds for free. He refused a reasonable request for food with open contempt: “who is David?… shall I then take my bread, and my water… and give it unto men, whom I know not whence they be?” (25:10–11). 

David responds by arming four hundred men, intending to wipe out every male in Nabal’s household by morning (25:13, 22).

A servant warns Abigail, described as “a woman of good understanding” married to a man who was “churlish and evil in his doings” (25:3). She acts immediately and without consulting her husband at all, loading donkeys with bread, wine, meat, and fruit, and riding out to intercept David before he reaches the house (25:18–20).

She takes full responsibility for an insult she never gave, and asks David directly not to let this become a stain on his conscience once he’s king: “that this shall be no grief unto thee… that thou hast shed blood causeless” (25:31). 

David immediately recognizes the wisdom in what she’s saying and turns his men around.

One woman’s fast thinking prevented David from carrying a massacre into the rest of his reign as king. 

Sometimes the person best positioned to stop a disaster is the one with the least official authority to do anything about it.

Question 4. Elijah asked a starving widow in Zarephath to make him bread first, before feeding herself and her son with what she believed was her very last handful of flour. What did she discover about her supplies afterward?

Answer: Her barrel of meal and her jar of oil never ran out for the entire length of the famine that followed (1 Kings 17:14–16).

Context & Exhortation: The widow is gathering sticks to cook one final meal for herself and her son when Elijah finds her, explicitly planning to eat it and then wait to die. The famine has left them with nothing else (17:12). 

Elijah’s request, in that context, sounds close to unreasonable: make me something first, and only afterward make something for yourselves (17:13).

He attaches a specific promise to the request: “the barrel of meal shall not waste, neither shall the cruse of oil fail, until the day that the LORD sendeth rain upon the earth” (17:14). 

The widow has no evidence yet that this will actually happen. She simply does what he asks, before knowing the outcome. And it holds. 

Day after day, the same small amount of flour and oil keeps producing enough for an unspecified length of time stretching across the entire famine (17:15–16). 

Nothing about the miracle looks dramatic from the outside. There was no visible refilling, no announcement, just supplies that should have run out that simply never do.

She gave away what she thought was her family’s very last meal before she had any proof the promise was real. The provision only became visible after the obedience, not before it.

Question 5. During one of Paul’s especially long sermons, a young man sitting in a window fell asleep, fell three stories to the ground, and was picked up dead. What was his name, and what happened next?

Answer: Eutychus (Acts 20:9). Paul went down, embraced him, and announced “his life is in him” — and he was brought back alive (20:10, 12).

Context & Exhortation: Paul is preaching in an upstairs room in Troas, and Luke gives us an oddly specific, almost sympathetic detail about why this happens: Paul “continued his speech until midnight” with “many lights in the upper chamber,” and Eutychus, “sunk down with sleep,” finally succumbs entirely and falls out the window from the third story (20:7–9).

The text doesn’t soften what happened: he “was taken up dead” (20:9). This isn’t presented as a fainting spell or a close call. Everyone at street level who reaches him first confirms he’s actually dead.

Paul goes down, falls on him, embraces him, and simply says, “Trouble not yourselves; for his life is in him” (20:10). He then goes back upstairs and keeps talking until daybreak, seemingly unbothered, while the people bring the young man home alive (20:12).

A sermon that ran too long, in a room that was too warm, cost a young man his life for a moment. And it happened, notably, because he was trying to stay present for something worth hearing, not because he wasn’t interested. 

Even sincere effort has limits, and grace met him exactly at the edge of his own.

Question 6. The Queen of Sheba traveled a great distance specifically to test Solomon’s wisdom. What method did she use to test him, and what was her reaction once she saw everything for herself?

Answer: She tested him with “hard questions,” or riddles (1 Kings 10:1–3). After seeing his wisdom, wealth, and household firsthand, “there was no more spirit in her” — she was left breathless with astonishment (10:4–5).

Context & Exhortation: Word of Solomon’s reputation had reached her from a considerable distance. 

It was traditionally understood to be somewhere in the Arabian Peninsula, and she doesn’t come to simply hear about his wisdom secondhand. She comes “to prove him with hard questions” (10:1), bringing an enormous caravan of spices, gold, and precious stones as a gift.

Solomon apparently answers everything she brings him without hesitation: “there was not any thing hid from the king, which he told her not” (10:3). 

It’s not just his answers that overwhelm her, though. She also takes in his palace, his officials, his cupbearers, and the sacrifices he offers, and the cumulative effect leaves her stunned.

Her own words afterward are unusually candid for a foreign monarch: “the half was not told me: thy wisdom and prosperity exceedeth the fame which I heard” (10:7). She’d already heard impressive reports and still found the reality to exceed them.

Jesus later references this exact story to make a pointed comparison: “the queen of the south… came from the uttermost parts of the earth to hear the wisdom of Solomon; and, behold, a greater than Solomon is here” (Matthew 12:42). She traveled a long distance for wisdom that pointed toward something greater she wouldn’t live to see.

Click to watch: https: https://www.youtube.com/live/kiCjlVlNH_U?si=GwfXrf2gwwEIRR8s