And the LORD has given a commandment concerning you:
No more shall your name be perpetuated: out of the house of your gods will I cut off the graven image and the molten image: I will make your grave; for you are vile.
Read Chapter 1
Athanasius the Apostolic
AD 373
Once again, dear friends, God has brought us to the Easter season. By his lovingkindness we are once more about to assemble for it. The same God who brought Israel out of Egypt now calls us to the feast, saying through Moses, “Take note of the month of new fruits, and keep the Passover to the Lord your God.” And through the prophet he calls, “Keep your feasts, O Judah; pay your vows to the Lord.” So if God himself loves the feast and calls us to it, it is not right, brothers and sisters, to postpone it or to observe it carelessly. We should come to it eagerly and zealously, so that with a joyful beginning here we will experience a foretaste of the heavenly feast that is to come.
The prophet Nahum (or, better, God speaking through him) says, “I will destroy the graven and molten thing; I will make it your grave. Behold upon the mountains the feet of him that brings peace. O Judah, keep your festivals and pay your vows, for it shall no longer be that they may pass into disuse. It is completed, it is consumed, it is taken away. He is come up that breathes into your face and rescues you from tribulation.” Anyone who knows the Gospels will recognize who it was that came up from hell and breathed the Holy Spirit into the face of Judah, that is, into the face of his Jewish disciples. The words about the festivals are, of course, a reference to the New Testament, in which festivals are so spiritually renewed that they can never “pass into disuse.” The rest of the prophecy too we see realized in that the gospel brought about the destruction of “graven and molten things,” that is, the idols of the false gods, consigned now to the oblivion of the grave.
