I'm not sure of what you're trying to achieve. Firstly, what is the problem with using cjne etc? If you can show us an example of code, we may be able to suggest an different method. As for a lookup table, what do you want to lookup?

For a simple lookup table:
;
; A has the idex into the lookup table
; returns looked up value in A
;
lookup:
mov dptr,#table
movc a,@a+dptr ;adds A to dptr, uses result as address, reads from code memory into A
ret

table:
db 1,2,4,8,16,32,64,128 ;value -> bit weight lookup


Or a jump table:
;
; A has routine# to jump to
;
;
jumpt:
mov a,b
rl a ;times 2
add a,b ;A = A times 3 (ljmp is 3 bytes long)
mov dptr,#jtable
jmp @a+dptr

jtable:
ljmp l0
ljmp l1
ljmp l2
ljmp l3

........






To implement timers, see:

http://www.8052.com/faq.phtml?FAQ=15