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.

469. Anyone today possessed of any inward wisdom can perceive or guess that the descriptions of Adam and his wife have some spiritual meaning, though what this is no one up to now has known, since the spiritual sense of the Word has only been revealed at the present time. Surely anyone can see even from a distance that Jehovah would not have put two trees in a garden, one of them to be a stumbling-block, unless this represented something spiritually. The idea that they were both cursed for eating from a tree, and this curse is attached to every person from their time, so that the whole human race was condemned for one man's fault, and one that involved no evil of carnal lust or injustice of the heart - can this be squared with Divine justice? In particular, why did Jehovah not deter Adam from eating, seeing that He was there to see it, and why did He not cast the serpent down into the underworld before it persuaded them?

[2] But, my friend, God did not do this, because by doing so He would have taken away man's free will; and it is this which makes man a man and not an animal. Once this is known, it is perfectly plain that the two trees, one leading to life and the other to death, represent man's free will in spiritual matters. Moreover, hereditary evil is not from this source, but from the parents, who pass on to their children a tendency to that evil which beset them themselves. The truth of this is clearly to be seen by anyone who studies the behaviour, minds and faces of the children, or even of whole families, descended from one father. Yet it depends upon each member of the family whether he wants to embrace or withdraw from his inheritance, since everyone is left to make his own choice. The particular meaning of the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil may be seen fully expounded in the experience described in 48 above.