In this fifth chapter of the Book of Amos, the first three verses (Amos 5:1-3) state the Lord's sorrow that the church - the truth from the Divine flowing into the world - has successively been devastated. (That was seen in Amos 4). When, in verse 3, it says, “The city that goes out by a thousand shall have a hundred left,” it means that very little truth is left to nourish the people. This bad state is their own doing.

In Amos 5:4-9, amid this dying out, the Lord entreats, almost anxiously, “Seek Me and live,” and then names traps, or spiritual states, that will turn people away from Him: Bethel, Gilgal, and Beersheba.

- The first, Bethel, here stands for falsifying knowledges.

- The second, Gilgal, signifies sensuous or external pleasures.

- The third, Beersheba, symbolized the last negative attitudes towards everything that constitutes faith and its doctrine. (See Arcana Coelestia 3923).

The next warning is to those “who turn justice into wormwood,” in Amos 5:7, i.e. they turn good into evil. (Arcana Coelestia 1488)

The Lord wants the people to return to Him, and explains clearly that He is the source of power, the one who, “made the Pleiades and Orion,” and the one who “rains ruin upon the strong”.

In Amos 5:10-13, in their love of their own intelligence, people continue to reject the Lord, to “tread down the poor,” rejecting even the little bits of truth coming to them. The people are warned, “Though you have built houses of hewn stone, yet you shall not dwell in them."

Stone meaning truths in our natural minds. (Apocalypse Explained 745). The dictionary meaning of “hewn” means a workman making something, so it can be seen as coming from ourselves, or our own intelligence. Anything like that is “devoid of life from the Divine” (Arcana Coelestia 9852).

In Amos 5:14-15, the path is shown for the way the Lord can be with us: “Seek good and not evil, that you may live.” It can’t be any plainer. In that way the Lord can reach out with His mercy, and “be gracious to the remnant of Joseph”. That remnant is a small amount of truth, and Joseph is the spiritual part of us. (Arcana Coelestia 3921).

In Amos 5:16-20, people are warned of how bad it will be for them when the day of the Lord comes. “Is not the day of the Lord darkness?”, for those who are in evil, “with no brightness in it?” A person’s suffering will be painful, “as though he went into the house, leaned his hand on the wall, and a serpent bit him,” and terrorizing, “As though a man fled from a lion and a bear met him.”

In Amos 5:21-22, God warns that people's fear-spurred worship won’t be accepted. He says, “I hate, I despise your feast days”. The strong language of the Lord is the mirror opposite of the depth of the evil the people are in.

In verses 23-25, "Take away your noisy songs and melodies," the Lord says, i.e. take away what sounds beautiful to you but is hurtful to the Divine because it lacks internal goodness and truth. In its place, in one of the Bible's memorable images, Jehovah says, "Let justice run down like water, and righteousness like a mightly stream”.

Then, at the end, in verses 26-27, the warning is clear: if the people don’t return to the Lord, everything good will be taken from them, as shown in verse 27:

“Therefore I will send you into captivity beyond Damascus”.

Damascus was the furthest boundary of Canaan, or beyond where spiritual things reside. The “boundary of Damascus” is also referred to in Ezekiel 47:16-18. See also Apocalypse Explained 1088.

8812. 'When it came to be morning' means a state when they were governed by good. This is clear from the meaning of 'morning' as a state of the good of love, dealt with in 8426. From these details - that Jehovah, that is, the Lord, came down onto Mount Sinai on the third day, and also in the morning of that day - it is plainly evident that this event was representative of some Divine reality in heaven which no one can come to know about except from the correspondence of such things as arise in the natural world with realities in the spiritual world, and therefore from the spiritual meaning of those things. This is so here so far as the meaning of 'morning' and 'the third day' are concerned. 'The third day' means the end of a former state, and it does so because 'three' means what is complete from start to finish, 8790; and 'morning' means a state of the good of love, because the sun - the sun in the next life which gives light to angels and the whole of heaven - is the Lord. The fire there is His Divine Love, which gives vital heat to all that lives, and the light there is Divine Truth which enlightens all who receive it. The sun there is altogether different from the sun in the world, whose fire is fire and not love, and whose radiating light is light and not truth.

[2] All this goes to show what kind of effects the fire and also the light coming from the sun in the world produce, and what kind of effects the fire and light coming from the sun of heaven produce. The sun in the world provides heat and light without life, whereas the sun in heaven provides heat and light together with life. The latter, being provided by the sun of heaven, are therefore called spiritual, because they hold life within them, whereas the former, which are provided by the sun of the world, are called natural and do not hold life within them. The life in living things that is recognized in their heat and indicated by it does not come from the heat of the sun in the world but from the heat of the sun in heaven. When the latter heat enters heat in the world it produces that effect; the body feels it as elemental heat, but this has vital heat in it, which has its origin in the love that is heat from the sun of heaven. The truth that vital heat springs from a source other than the sun in the world, and that it owes its origin to love and exists according to the amount and the character of that love within it, anyone is able to know provided that he is prepared to think about it properly. Anyone can know except those who do not acknowledge anything internal in the human being and attribute everything to natural forces.

[3] Since therefore heat from the sun in heaven, which is the Lord, is the good of love, and the light from it is the truth of faith, one may see what is meant by 'morning', and what by 'midday', 'evening', and 'night' in the next life. They are states of good and truth or love and faith, 'morning' being a state of the good of love, 'midday' a state of the truth of faith, 'evening and night' a deprivation of them, which is ignorance and blindness in insights that belong to faith, and also slowness and coldness in feelings that belong to heavenly love.

[4] Furthermore the situation with the sun of heaven is as it is with the sun in the world, in that it is motionless and does not bring about those states by any wheeling round of its own. Rather the things around it bring them about, just as a planet travelling round the sun and at the same time rotating on its axis produces changes. The appearance therefore is that those changes are attributable to the sun, but in reality they are not attributable to the sun, only to the planet going round it. So also in heaven. Changes of state there, to which morning, midday, evening, and night correspond, are not attributable to the sun there, for that sun is always radiating heat and light, that is, the good of love and the truth of faith. Instead those changes are attributable to the recipients, that is to say, to the angels and spirits, who move through a regular cycle of such changes as their life progresses. At one point it is morning, that is, they are filled with the good of love; at another it is midday, that is, they are enlightened with the truth of faith; and at yet another it is evening and night, that is, these gifts become vague and dull with them.

[5] The reason why the situation in the world is as it is in heaven, except for the difference that in the world the regular cycle consists of states belonging to the times of day, while in heaven it consists of states of life, is that all things in the world have been created in the image of those in heaven. For natural things arise from spiritual ones as effects from their causes. Consequently there is a correspondence of all things in the world with those in heaven, and therefore the whole natural order is nothing other than a theatre representative of the Lord's kingdom, 3483, 4939, 8211.