When the viper wound itself around Paul’s hand, he had to decide in a split second what to do. Thank God that there was a fire before him. So he shook the beast into it. Could not Paul have started a prayer meeting against the viper? No. There is a time to pray, and a time to act. He could not have afforded to waste time. By the Holy Spirit’s enablement, he was able to catch in a second the best way to deal with the present situation; the best judgment to pass on the enemy.
Imagine that Paul had to start looking for a stick to kill the viper with; with what hand would he have taken the stick, when it was probably his useful, powerful and ‘anointed’ hand, the right hand, with which he had been sorting the wood into the fire, that the snake had arrested? How would he have started in old age to learn a left-handed ministry, to say nothing of the awkwardness of using the left hand, perhaps, to handle a stick with which to fight a snake that had wound itself around his more skilled right hand?
Secondly, that kind of approach could have jeopardized Paul himself. He could not have attacked the snake that way without also doing harm to himself, for the serpent had sought to make itself a ‘part’ of Paul, of his right hand. Paul had to have a ‘deliverance’ from that demon of a viper, but not through a process that would also do harm to his body as he tried to extricate himself from the beast.
He needed instant wisdom from the Holy Spirit on the best way to approach the present challenge. He did not have to use a method he had seen others use to great success in other situations. His was a unique case and it demanded its own unique approach. The ‘fire method’ readily made itself available, and that was the way the beast had to be dealt with. What mattered was not how many others had dealt with their own attacks from snakes by means of the ‘stick method,’ but how the Holy Ghost led Him in that instance. Jesus did not heal every blind man the same way; He did not, by the same method, raise all the dead He raised.
And there are diversities of operations, but it is the same God which worketh all in all (1 Corinthians 12:6).