Amos 5:7-10 - There are those who turn justice into bitterness

5:7

Courts are meant to administer justice, but legal systems can become dysfunctional. Perhaps the most common way this happen is by outright corruption. Either the state or rich individuals directly corrupt the system, so it gives them the decisions they want, rather than just decisions. This is the sort of thing that happened in Israel in Amos' day, and which happened in Nazi Germany and Communist Russia, among many other places. Alternatively, it can happen through creeping dysfunction, and this is happening in the West. Special interest groups corrupt the system, or creeping bureaucracy gradually make the system unworkable. The system becomes so expensive and complicated that ordinary people cannot get justice. Or technicalities start to rule the day, rather than justice.

5:8,9

Pleiades and Orion were star constellations. Many civilisations looked to the stars and believed that certain arrangements of constellations indicated or caused disasters to occur. Israel was being corrupted by the surrounding culture. God reminds them that it is He who created the stars, it is He who brings forth the day and the night. Humanity is so prone to worship the created rather than the creator.

5:10

I think it was George Orwell who said “in a time of universal deceit, telling the truth is a revolutionary act”. In all dictatorships telling the truth is a dangerous thing to so. But it is also dangerous in our own society. To say that abortion involves killing babies is increasingly to put yourself beyond the pale of “decent society”, as is to say that trans ideology is dangerous nonsense, or that homosexual acts are not good, or that marriage is the best place for bringing up children. And society is increasingly trying to silence those that say these things, resorting to the law if necessary.