Bearing Fruits Worthy of Repentance

The tax collectors and soldiers came to John, listening to his preaching, believing his message, and asking, "What shall we do?"  The answer for all of them was pretty much, "Do your job honestly, without hurting other people."

Now if you were a taxpayer in Judea at that time, whether you believed in the Lord or not, you would derive some benefit from all these people trusting in the Messiah.  These Christians beginning to bear fruits of repentance.  Some of the taxpayers would be collecting only the amount they were supposed to collect. Some of the soldiers would be fair and good.  Certainly not all of them.  And not even these new Christians were sinless.  But some of them were indeed transformed (in part) by the Gospel they believed.

So even before Jesus died,
even before He was miraculously healing people,
even before He was preaching,

already there were some temporal blessings breaking in, like the tiniest little foretaste of what was yet to come.