God bless you for your intellectual integrity!
I don’t see them as mutually exclusive. I often gave my children more than one reason to obey their mother and me in a given matter, and especially did I have to do this in their teenage years. The “Exodus rationale” meant that Israel would bear witness to the surrounding nations of idol worshipers that one true invisible God had made the heavens and earth and all that is in them. The “Deuteronomy rationale” meant that Israel could bear this witness to the nations only because God had miraculously liberated them from the bondage of Egypt, giving them a measure of rest that would have been unthinkable to Pharaoh.
Again, sir, I must salute your intellectual honesty.
This, to me, is a very important point and it is one of my biggest struggles in this age of the earth (and evolution, etc.) issue - though I have not spoken of it until now. That is, I think you are absolutely right about what you say here about what Israel thought. Throughout Scripture I see God vindicating His spokesmen, not making them look naive and childish in human hindsight. Why would God have ancient Israel bear weekly witness to themselves and to all the nations who knew them regarding His claim to have created the world in six days knowing it was only a matter of time before He’d have to grossly modify the claim. In fact, “grossly” is understating the matter because the claim would go from “God created the universe in an incredibly short period of time!” to “God created the universe over an incredibly long period of time!” Would God not be eager to give His nation a more lasting message about His role of Creator than that? God’s prophets were always at risk for life and limb, and in return God always sought to vindicate them in due time.
If the truth is that the earth is 4.543B years old, I do not think God would have needed to say “billions” in Genesis 1 in order to better allow for acceptance by Bible thumpers like me. I don’t know Hebrew, but I see enough variety and richness of language in my English Old Testament that there were ample ways God could written Genesis 1 in majestic language that would be no obstacle to modern scientific discoveries. Consider OT phrases you have encountered: “ancient times,” “distant past,” “from the days of eternity,” just to mention a few. God knows how to be obscure and leave room for later revelation when He wants to. The very starkness of the contrast between “six days” and “4.543B years” begs the inquiry, “Why, God, why?” It’s almost as if God wants us in the 21st century to have to choose between a supernatural beginning and a natural one.