Does anyone know of a solution for this? I’m super new with Illustrator, so I’m basically looking up tutorials as I try to do things. I had a raster image in Illustrator, and a path which I would like to use to crop the image. The methods I’ve found are “non-destructive,” (Object > Clipping Mask > Make) so even though it looks fine, the rest of the image is still there. Thanks to the above suggestion, I exported the cropped image as a jpg and put it back in, and that worked, it just seems very inelegant. 
Does anyone know a better way?
I am really having fun with this!