In chapter 4 of the Book of Amos, verses 1-3 are talking about people who pervert the truths of the church. They will fall into falsities in outermost things.

In the Bible, fish represent "lower" things than mammals, so we can interpret the fishhooks in verse 2 as meaning being caught and held fast in natural or lower things.

Verses 4-6 are about acts of worship such as tithes and sacrifices. These look similar to genuine worship, but are only external sorts of things. We can tell because ‘teeth’ (in verse 6) represent ultimates or outermost things (see Secrets of Heaven 6380). It follows that “cleanness of teeth” would mean outermost things that look good but only imitate genuine worship. The Lord exhorts, “Yet you have not returned to me.”

Verses 7-8. Some things true will remain, when where there are too many false ideas, the truths don't get through. This can be seen where the Lord says, “I made it rain on one city; I withheld rain from another city... where it did not rain the part withered.” Again the Lord exhorts, “Yet you have not returned to me.”

Verse 9. Afterward all things of the church are falsified, shown by blight attacking the gardens, vineyards, fig tree and olive trees. The last three represent spiritual, natural and celestial things, or all the things of spiritual life. “Yet you have not returned to me,” says the Lord.

Verses 10-11. The Lord explains the devastating things he allowed to happen: plague in Egypt, death of young men by swords, stench in the camps, Sodom and Gomorrah. This is because they are profaned by sensual knowledges. Profanation means the mixing of good and evil together. (See Secrets of Heaven 1001[2]).

This extends to all things of the church, with the church being the Lord’s kingdom on earth (Secrets of Heaven 768[3]).

With profanation “as soon as any idea of what is holy arises, the idea of what is profane joins immediately to it,” (Secrets of Heaven 301).

Now there is hardly anything left. “Yet you have not returned to Me,” says the Lord again.

Verses 12-13: Because people adamantly remain in their profane ways, they are warned, “Prepare to meet your God!”. This is the God powerful and mighty, “who forms mountains, and creates the wind,” and even more close to home, “Who declares to man what his thought is.” As intimately a knowing as that is, the Lord’s love for all humanity is contained in His exhortations for them to turn themselves to Him.

See, for example, Luke 6:44-45, and True Christian Religion 373.

334. As a fig tree drops its late figs when it is shaken by a mighty wind. This symbolically means, by reasonings of the natural self divorced from the spiritual self.

We say that this is its symbolic meaning even though the characterization is a metaphor, because all metaphors in the Word are at the same time correspondent expressions, and they cohere in the spiritual sense with the subject being addressed.

Such is the case here. For a fig tree by correspondence symbolizes a person's natural goodness conjoined with his spiritual goodness, and here, in an opposite sense, a person's natural goodness divorced from his spiritual goodness, which is not good. Moreover, because the natural self divorced from the spiritual self corrupts by its reasonings any concepts of goodness and truth, symbolized by the stars, it follows that this is what is symbolized by a fig tree shaken by a mighty wind.

That a wind or a storm symbolizes reasoning is apparent from many passages in the Word, but because we are dealing with a metaphor, it is not necessary for us to cite them here.

A fig tree symbolizes a person's natural goodness because every tree symbolizes some element of the church in a person, and so also the person himself in respect to it. By way of confirmation we cite the following:

All the host of heaven... shall fall down, as the leaf falls from the vine, and as it falls from a fig tree. (Isaiah 34:4)

I will surely consume them... No grapes shall be on the vine, nor figs on the fig tree, and the leaf shall float down. (Jeremiah 8:13)

All your strongholds are as fig trees with their first ripe figs, which, if they are shaken, fall into the mouth of the eater. (Nahum 3:12)

And so also elsewhere, as in Jeremiah 24:2-3, 5, 8; Mark 11:12-14, 20-26; Luke 6:44; 13:6-9. In these places a fig tree has exactly this meaning.